The Mountain which kept watch to the north of Rockland lay waste and almost inviolate through much of its domain.  The catamount still glared from the branches of its old hemlocks on the lesser beasts that strayed beneath him.  It was not long since a wolf had wandered down, famished in the winter’s dearth, and left a few bones and some tufts of wool of what had been a lamb in the morning.  Nay, there were broad-footed tracks in the snow only two years previously, which could not be mistaken;—­the black bear alone could have set that plantigrade seal, and little children must come home early from school and play, for he is an indiscriminate feeder when he is hungry, and a little child would not come amiss when other game was wanting.

But these occasional visitors may have been mere wanderers, which, straying along in the woods by day, and perhaps stalking through the streets of still villages by night, had worked their way along down from the ragged mountain-spurs of higher latitudes.  The one feature of The Mountain that shed the brownest horror on its woods was the existence of the terrible region known as Rattlesnake Ledge, and still tenanted by those damnable reptiles, which distil a fiercer venom under our cold northern sky than the cobra himself in the land of tropical spices and poisons.

From the earliest settlement of the place, this fact had been, next to the Indians, the reigning nightmare of the inhabitants.  It was easy enough, after a time, to drive away the savages; for “a screeching Indian Divell,” as our fathers called him, could not crawl into the crack of a rock to escape from his pursuers.  But the venomous population of Rattlesnake Ledge had a Gibraltar for their fortress that might have defied the siege-train dragged to the walls of Sebastopol.  In its deep embrasures and its impregnable easemates they reared their families, they met in love or wrath, they twined together in family knots, they hissed defiance in hostile clans, they fed, slept, hibernated, and in due time died in peace.  Many a foray had the towns-people made, and many a stuffed skin was shown as a trophy,—­nay, there were families where the children’s first toy was made from the warning appendage that once vibrated to the wrath of one of these “cruel serpents.”  Sometimes one of them, coaxed out by a warm sun, would writhe himself down the hillside into the roads, up the walks that led to houses,—­worse than this, into the long grass, where the barefooted mowers would soon pass with their swinging scythes,—­more rarely into houses, and on one memorable occasion, early in the last century, into the meeting-house, where he took a position on the pulpit-stairs,—­as is narrated in the “Account of Some Remarkable Providences,” etc., where it is suggested that a strong tendency of the Rev. Didymus Bean, the Minister at that time, towards the Arminian Heresy may have had something to do with it, and that the Serpent supposed to have been killed on the Pulpit-Stairs was a false show of the Daemon’s Contrivance, he having come in to listen to a Discourse which was a sweet Savour in his Nostrils, and, of course, not being capable of being killed Himself.  Others said, however, that, though there was good Reason to think it was a Damon, yet he did come with Intent to bite the Heel of that faithful Servant,—­etc.