but awful countenance. He looked on the people as if he had seen many such concourses. The hyena was the most ugly and dangerous looking beast, full of spite, and on ill terms with all nature, looking a good deal like a hog with the devil in him, the ridge of hair along his back bristling. He was in the cage with a leopard and a panther, and the latter seemed continually on the point of laying his paw on the hyena, who snarled, and showed his teeth. It is strange, though, to see how these wild beasts acknowledge and practise a degree of mutual forbearance, and of obedience to man, with their wild nature yet in them. The great white bear seemed in distress from the heat, moving his head and body in a peculiar, fantastic way, and eagerly drinking water when given it. He was thin and lank.
The caravan men were so sleepy, Orrin S — — — says, that he could hardly wake them in the morning. They turned over on their faces to show him.
Coming out of the caravansary, there were the mountains, in the quiet sunset, and many men drunk, swearing, and fighting. Shanties with liquor for sale.
The elephant lodged in the barn.
September 5th. — I took a walk of three miles from the village, which brought me into Vermont. The line runs athwart a bridge, — a rude bridge, which crosses a mountain stream. The stream runs deep at the bottom of a gorge, plashing downward, with rapids and pools, and bestrewn with large rocks, deep and shady, not to be reached by the sun except in its meridian, as well on account of the depth of the gorge as of the arch of wilderness trees above it. There was a stumpy clearing beyond the bridge, where some men were building a house. I went to them, and inquired if I were in Massachusetts or Vermont, and asked for some water. Whereupon they showed great hospitality, and the master-workman went to the spring, and brought delicious water in a tin basin, and produced another jug containing “new rum, and very good; and rum does nobody any harm if they make a good use of it,” quoth he. I invited them to call on me at the hotel, if they should cone to the village within two or three days. Then I took my way back through the forest, for this is a by-road, and is, much of its course, a sequestrated and wild one, with an unseen torrent roaring at an unseen depth, along the roadside.
My walk forth had been an almost continued ascent, and, returning, I had an excellent view of Graylock and the adjacent mountains, at such a distance that they were all brought into one group, and comprehended at one view, as belonging to the same company, — all mighty, with a mightier chief. As I drew nearer home, they separated, and the unity of effect was lost. The more distant then disappeared behind the nearer ones, and finally Graylock itself was lost behind the hill which immediately shuts in the village. There was a warm, autumnal haze, which, I think, seemed to throw the mountains farther off, and both to enlarge and soften them.
To imagine the gorges and deep hollows in among the group of mountains, — their huge shoulders and protrusions.
“They were just beginning to pitch over the mountains, as I came along,” — stage-driver’s expression about the caravan.
A fantastic figure of a village coxcomb, striding through the bar-room, and standing with folded arms to survey the caravan men. There is much exaggeration and rattle-brain about this fellow.
A mad girl leaped from the top of a tremendous precipice in Pownall, hundreds of feet high, if the tale be true, and, being buoyed up by her clothes, came safely to the bottom.
Inquiries about the coming of the caravan, and whether the elephant had got to town, and reports that he had.
A smart, plump, crimson-faced gentleman, with a travelling-portmanteau of peculiar neatness and convenience. He criticises the road over the mountain, having come in the Greenfield stage; perhaps an engineer.
Bears still inhabit Saddleback and the neighboring mountains and forests. Six were taken in Pownall last year, and two hundred foxes. Sometimes they appear on the hills, in close proximity to this village.
September 7th. — Mr. Leach and I took a walk by moonlight last evening, on the road that leads over the mountain. Remote from houses, far up on the hillside, we found a limekiln, burning near the road; and, approaching it, a watcher started from the ground, where he had been lying at his length. There are several of these limekilns in this vicinity. They are circular, built with stones, like a round tower, eighteen or twenty feet high, having a hillock heaped around in a great portion of their circumference, so that the marble may be brought and thrown in by cartloads at the top. At the bottom there is a doorway, large enough to admit a man in a stooping posture. Thus an edifice of great solidity is constructed, which will endure for centuries, unless needless pains are taken to tear it down. There is one on the hillside, close to the village, wherein weeds grow at the bottom, and grass and shrubs too are rooted in the interstices of the stones, and its low doorway has a dungeon-like aspect, and we look down from the top as into a roofless tower. It apparently has not been used for many years, and the lime and weather-stained fragments of marble are scattered about.
But in the one we saw last night a hard-wood fire was burning merrily, beneath the superincumbent marble, — the kiln being heaped full; and shortly after we came, the man (a dark, black-bearded figure, in shirtsleeves) opened the iron door, through the chinks of which the fire was gleaming, and thrust in huge logs of wood, and stirred the immense coals with a long pole, and showed us the glowing limestone, — the lower layer of it. The heat of the fire was powerful, at the distance of several yards from the open door. He talked very sensibly with us, being doubtless glad to have two visitors to vary his solitary night-watch; for it would not do for him to fall asleep, since the fire should be refreshed as often as every twenty minutes. We ascended the hillock to the top of the kiln, and the marble was red-hot, and burning with a bluish, lambent flame, quivering up, sometimes nearly a yard high, and resembling the flame of anthracite coal, only, the marble being in large fragments, the flame was higher. The kiln was perhaps six or eight feet across. Four hundred bushels of marble were then in a state of combustion. The expense of converting this quantity into lime is about fifty dollars, and it sells for twenty-five cents per bushel at the kiln. We asked the man whether he would run across the top of the intensely burning kiln, barefooted, for a thousand dollars; and he said he would for ten. He told us that the lime had been burning forty-eight hours, and would be finished in thirty-six more. He liked the business of watching it better by night than by day; because the days were often hot, but such a mild and beautiful night as the last was just right. Here a poet might make verses with moonlight in them, and a gleam of fierce firelight flickering through. It is a shame to use this brilliant, white, almost transparent marble in this way. A man said of it, the other day, that into some pieces of it, when polished, one could see a good distance; and he instanced a certain gravestone.
Visited the cave. A large portion of it, where water trickles and falls, is perfectly white. The walls present a specimen of how Nature packs the stone, crowding huge masses, as it were, into chinks and fissures, and here we see it in the perpendicular or horizontal layers, as Nature laid it.
September 9th. — A walk yesterday forenoon through the Notch, formed between Saddle Mountain and another adjacent one. This Notch is otherwise called the Bellowspipe, being a long and narrow valley, with a steep wall on either side. The walls are very high, and the fallen timbers lie strewed adown the precipitous descent. The valley gradually descends from the narrowest part of the Notch, and a stream of water flows through the midst of it, which, farther onward in its course, turns a mill. The valley is cultivated, there being two or three farmhouses towards the northern end, and extensive fields of grass beyond, where stand the hay-mows of last year, with the hay cut away regularly around their bases. All the more distant portion of the valley is lonesome in the extreme; and on the hither side of the narrowest part the land is uncultivated, partly overgrown with forest, partly used as sheep-pastures, for which purpose it is not nearly so barren as sheep-pastures usually are. On the right, facing southward, rises Graylock, all beshagged with forest, and with headlong precipices of rock appearing among the black pines. Southward there is a most extensive view of the valley, in which
