Belknap, The Historian Of This State, Says That, "In The
Neighborhood Of Fresh Rivers And Ponds, A Whitish Fog In
The
morning lying over the water is a sure indication of fair weather
for that day; and when no fog
Is seen, rain is expected before
night." That which seemed to us to invest the world was only a
narrow and shallow wreath of vapor stretched over the channel of
the Merrimack from the seaboard to the mountains. More extensive
fogs, however, have their own limits. I once saw the day break
from the top of Saddle-back Mountain in Massachusetts, above the
clouds. As we cannot distinguish objects through this dense fog,
let me tell this story more at length.
I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer
days, plucking the raspberries by the wayside, and occasionally
buying a loaf of bread at a farmer's house, with a knapsack on my
back which held a few traveller's books and a change of clothing,
and a staff in my hand. I had that morning looked down from the
Hoosack Mountain, where the road crosses it, on the village of
North Adams in the valley three miles away under my feet, showing
how uneven the earth may sometimes be, and making it seem an
accident that it should ever be level and convenient for the feet
of man. Putting a little rice and sugar and a tin cup into my
knapsack at this village, I began in the afternoon to ascend the
mountain, whose summit is three thousand six hundred feet above
the level of the sea, and was seven or eight miles distant by the
path. My route lay up a long and spacious valley called the
Bellows, because the winds rush up or down it with violence in
storms, sloping up to the very clouds between the principal range
and a lower mountain. There were a few farms scattered along at
different elevations, each commanding a fine prospect of the
mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the
valley on which near the head there was a mill. It seemed a road
for the pilgrim to enter upon who would climb to the gates of
heaven. Now I crossed a hay-field, and now over the brook on a
slight bridge, still gradually ascending all the while with a
sort of awe, and filled with indefinite expectations as to what
kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature I should come to at
last. It now seemed some advantage that the earth was uneven,
for one could not imagine a more noble position for a farm-house
than this vale afforded, farther from or nearer to its head, from
a glen-like seclusion overlooking the country at a great
elevation between these two mountain walls.
It reminded me of the homesteads of the Huguenots, on Staten
Island, off the coast of New Jersey. The hills in the interior
of this island, though comparatively low, are penetrated in
various directions by similar sloping valleys on a humble scale,
gradually narrowing and rising to the centre, and at the head of
these the Huguenots, who were the first settlers, placed their
houses quite within the land, in rural and sheltered places, in
leafy recesses where the breeze played with the poplar and the
gum-tree, from which, with equal security in calm and storm, they
looked out through a widening vista, over miles of forest and
stretching salt marsh, to the Huguenot's Tree, an old elm on the
shore at whose root they had landed, and across the spacious
outer bay of New York to Sandy Hook and the Highlands of
Neversink, and thence over leagues of the Atlantic, perchance to
some faint vessel in the horizon, almost a day's sail on her
voyage to that Europe whence they had come.
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