The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in the impression on either side.  When they told her that her maple sugar would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion’s Head stamped on it, she answered that she got enough of Lion’s Head without wanting to see it on all the sugar she made.  But the next year the cakes bore a rude effigy of Lion’s Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the stamp out with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the sugar, but her manner remained the same.  It did not change when the excursionists drove away, and the deep silence native to the place fell after their chatter.  When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse neighed, or one of the boys shouted to the cattle, an echo retorted from the granite base of Lion’s Head, and then she had all the noise she wanted, or, at any rate, all the noise there was most of the time.  Now and then a wagon passed on the stony road by the brook in the valley, and sent up its clatter to the farm-house on its high shelf, but there was scarcely another break from the silence except when the coaching-parties came.

The continuous clash and rush of the brook was like a part of the silence, as the red of the farm-house and the barn was like a part of the green of the fields and woods all round them:  the black-green of pines and spruces, the yellow-green of maples and birches, dense to the tops of the dreary hills, and breaking like a bated sea around the Lion’s Head.  The farmer stooped at his work, with a thin, inward-curving chest, but his wife stood straight at hers; and she had a massive beauty of figure and a heavily moulded regularity of feature that impressed such as had eyes to see her grandeur among the summer folks.  She was forty when they began to come, and an ashen gray was creeping over the reddish heaps of her hair, like the pallor that overlies the crimson of the autumnal oak.  She showed her age earlier than most fair people, but since her marriage at eighteen she had lived long in the deaths of the children she had lost.  They were born with the taint of their father’s family, and they withered from their cradles.  The youngest boy alone; of all her brood, seemed to have inherited her health and strength.  The rest as they grew up began to cough, as she had heard her husband’s brothers and sisters cough, and then she waited in hapless patience the fulfilment of their doom.  The two little girls whose faces the ladies of the first coaching-party saw at the farm-house windows had died away from them; two of the lank boys had escaped, and in the perpetual exile of California and Colorado had saved themselves alive.  Their father talked of going, too, but ten years later he still dragged himself spectrally about the labors of the farm, with the same cough at sixty which made his oldest son at twenty-nine look scarcely younger than himself.

II.