“Matthew,” said Hannah, clinging to him, “let us go hence.”

Matthew saw that she was faint, and, kneeling down, supported her in his arms while he threw some of the thrillingly-cold water of the enchanted lake upon her face and bosom.  It revived her, but could not renovate her courage.

“Yes, dearest,” cried Matthew, pressing her tremulous form to his breast; “we will go hence and return to our humble cottage.  The blessed sunshine and the quiet moonlight shall come through our window.  We will kindle the cheerful glow of our hearth at eventide and be happy in its light.  But never again will we desire more light than all the world may share with us.”

“No,” said his bride, “for how could we live by day or sleep by night in this awful blaze of the Great Carbuncle?”

Out of the hollow of their hands they drank each a draught from the lake, which presented them its waters uncontaminated by an earthly lip.  Then, lending their guidance to the blinded cynic, who uttered not a word, and even stifled his groans in his own most wretched heart, they began to descend the mountain.  Yet as they left the shore, till then untrodden, of the spirit’s lake, they threw a farewell glance toward the cliff and beheld the vapors gathering in dense volumes, through which the gem burned duskily.

As touching the other pilgrims of the Great Carbuncle, the legend goes on to tell that the worshipful Master Ichabod Pigsnort soon gave up the quest as a desperate speculation, and wisely resolved to betake himself again to his warehouse, near the town-dock, in Boston.  But as he passed through the Notch of the mountains a war-party of Indians captured our unlucky merchant and carried him to Montreal, there holding him in bondage till by the payment of a heavy ransom he had woefully subtracted from his hoard of pine-tree shillings.  By his long absence, moreover, his affairs had become so disordered that for the rest of his life, instead of wallowing in silver, he had seldom a sixpence-worth of copper.  Doctor Cacaphodel, the alchemist, returned to his laboratory with a prodigious fragment of granite, which he ground to powder, dissolved in acids, melted in the crucible and burnt with the blowpipe, and published the result of his experiments in one of the heaviest folios of the day.  And for all these purposes the gem itself could not have answered better than the granite.  The poet, by a somewhat similar mistake, made prize of a great piece of ice which he found in a sunless chasm of the mountains, and swore that it corresponded in all points with his idea of the Great Carbuncle.  The critics say that, if his poetry lacked the splendor of the gem, it retained all the coldness of the ice.  The lord De Vere went back to his ancestral hall, where he contented himself with a wax-lighted chandelier, and filled in due course of time another coffin in the ancestral vault.  As the funeral torches gleamed within that dark receptacle, there was no need of the Great Carbuncle to show the vanity of earthly pomp.