Persons have been known to remove from the place, after a short residence in it, because they were haunted day and night by the thought of this awful green wall, piled up into the air over their heads.  They would lie awake of nights, thinking they heard the muffed snapping of roots, as if a thousand acres of the mountain-side were tugging to break away, like the snow from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees were clinging with all their fibres to hold back the soil just ready to peel away and crash down with all its rocks and forest-growths.  And yet, by one of those strange contradictions we are constantly finding in human nature, there were natives of the town who would come back thirty or forty years after leaving it, just to nestle under this same threatening mountainside, as old men sun themselves against southward-facing walls.  The old dreams and legends of danger added to the attraction.  If the mountain should ever slide, they had a kind of feeling as if they ought to be there.  It was a fascination like that which the rattlesnake is said to exert.

This comparison naturally suggests the recollection of that other source of danger which was an element in the every-day life of the Rockland people.  The folks in some of the neighboring towns had a joke against them, that a Rocklander could n’t hear a beanpod rattle without saying, “The Lord have mercy on us!” It is very true, that many a nervous old lady has had a terrible start, caused by some mischievous young rogue’s giving a sudden shake to one of these noisy vegetable products in her immediate vicinity.  Yet, strangely enough, many persons missed the excitement of the possibility of a fatal bite in other regions, where there were nothing but black and green and striped snakes, mean ophidians, having the spite of the nobler serpent without his venom,—­poor crawling creatures, whom Nature would not trust with a poison-bag.  Many natives of Rockland did unquestionably experience a certain gratification in this infinitesimal sense of danger.  It was noted that the old people retained their hearing longer than in other places.  Some said it was the softened climate, but others believed it was owing to the habit of keeping their ears open whenever they were walking through the grass or in the woods.  At any rate, a slight sense of danger is often an agreeable stimulus.  People sip their creme de noyau with a peculiar tremulous pleasure, because there is a bare possibility that it may contain prussic acid enough to knock them over; in which case they will lie as dead as if a thunder-cloud had emptied itself into the earth through their brain and marrow.

But Rockland had other features which helped to give it a special character.  First of all, there was one grand street which was its chief glory.  Elm Street it was called, naturally enough, for its elms made a long, pointed-arched gallery of it through most of its extent.  No natural Gothic arch compares, for a moment, with that formed by two American elms, where their lofty jets of foliage shoot across each other’s ascending curves, to intermingle their showery flakes of green.  When one looks through a long double row of these, as in that lovely avenue which the poets of Yale remember so well,