‘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 towards 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 burned with the blow-pipe, 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.