‘Old and young, we dream of graves and monuments,’ murmured the stranger youth.  ’I wonder how mariners feel when the ship is sinking, and they, unknown and undistinguished, are to be buried together in the ocean—­that wide and nameless sepulchre?’

For a moment, the old woman’s ghastly conception so engrossed the minds of her hearers that a sound abroad in the night, rising like the roar of a blast, had grown broad, deep, and terrible, before the fated group were conscious of it.  The house and all within it trembled; the foundations of the earth seemed to be shaken, as if this awful sound were the peal of the last trump.  Young and old exchanged one wild glance, and remained an instant, pale, affrighted, without utterance, or power to move.  Then the same shriek burst simultaneously from all their lips.

‘The Slide!  The Slide!’

The simplest words must intimate, but not portray, the unutterable horror of the catastrophe.  The victims rushed from their cottage, and sought refuge in what they deemed a safer spot—­where, in contemplation of such an emergency, a sort of barrier had been reared.  Alas! they had quitted their security, and fled right into the pathway of destruction.  Down came the whole side of the mountain, in a cataract of ruin.  Just before it reached the house, the stream broke into two branches—­shivered not a window there, but overwhelmed the whole vicinity, blocked up the road, and annihilated everything in its dreadful course.  Long ere the thunder of the great Slide had ceased to roar among the mountains, the mortal agony had been endured, and the victims were at peace.  Their bodies were never found.

The next morning, the light smoke was seen stealing from the cottage chimney up the mountain side.  Within, the fire was yet smouldering on the hearth, and the chairs in a circle round it, as if the inhabitants had but gone forth to view the devastation of the Slide, and would shortly return, to thank Heaven for their miraculous escape.  All had left separate tokens, by which those who had known the family were made to shed a tear for each.  Who has not heard their name? (The story has been told far and wide, and Will forever be a legend of these mountains.) Poets have sung their fate.

There were circumstances which led some to suppose that a stranger had been received into the cottage on this awful night, and had shared the catastrophe of all its inmates.  Others denied that there were sufficient grounds for such a conjecture.  Woe for the high-souled youth, with his dream of Earthly Immortality!  His name and person utterly unknown; his history, his way of life, his plans, a mystery never to be solved, his death and his existence equally a doubt!  Whose was the agony of that death moment?

THE GREAT CARBUNCLE

A MYSTERY OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS

(The Indian tradition, on which this somewhat extravagant tale is founded, is both too wild and too beautiful to be adequately wrought up in prose.  Sullivan, in his History of Maine, written since the Revolution, remarks, that even then the existence of the Great Carbuncle was not entirely discredited.)