——­The master had struck up The Mountain obliquely from the western side of the Dudley mansion-house.  In this way he ascended until he reached a point many hundred feet above the level of the plain, and commanding all the country beneath and around.  Almost at his feet he saw the mansion-house, the chimney standing out of the middle of the roof, or rather, like a black square hole in it,—­the trees almost directly over their stems, the fences as lines, the whole nearly as an architect would draw a ground-plan of the house and the inclosures round it.  It frightened him to see how the huge masses of rock and old forest-growths hung over the home below.  As he descended a little and drew near the ledge of evil name, he was struck with the appearance of a long narrow fissure that ran parallel with it and above it for many rods, not seemingly of very old standing,—­for there were many fibres of roots which had evidently been snapped asunder when the rent took place, and some of which were still succulent in both separated portions.

Mr. Bernard had made up his mind, when he set forth, not to come back before he had examined the dreaded ledge.  He had half persuaded himself that it was scientific curiosity.  He wished to examine the rocks, to see what flowers grew there, and perhaps to pick up an adventure in the zooelogical line; for he had on a pair of high, stout boots, and he carried a stick in his hand, which was forked at one extremity, so as to be very convenient to hold down a crotalus with, if he should happen to encounter one.  He knew the aspect of the ledge, from a distance; for its bald and leprous-looking declivities stood out in their nakedness from the wooded sides of The Mountain, when this was viewed from certain points of the village.  But the nearer aspect of the blasted region had something frightful in it.  The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had been gnawed for thousands of years by hungry waves.  In some places they overhung their base so as to look like leaning towers that might topple over at any minute.  In other parts they were scooped into niches or caverns.  Here and there they were cracked in deep fissures, some of them of such width that one might enter them, if he cared to run the risk of meeting the regular tenants, who might treat him as an intruder.

Parts of the ledge were cloven perpendicularly, with nothing but cracks or slightly projecting edges in which or on which a foot could find hold.  High up on one of these precipitous walls of rock he saw some tufts of flowers, and knew them at once for the same that he had found between the leaves of his Virgil.  Not there, surely!  No woman would have clung against that steep, rough parapet to gather an idle blossom.  And yet the master looked round everywhere, and even up the side of that rock, to see if there were no signs of a woman’s footstep.  He peered about curiously, as if his eye might fall on some of those fragments of dress which women leave