In The Footprints Of The Padres Part 14

A week ago I could have added here that in the annals of the yacht clubs of San Francisco there has never been a fatal accident, never a drowning, nor a capsizing, nor a wreck, and this covers a period of thirteen years; alas! in a single day, on a cruise such as I have been writing of, there was a shocking death. One yacht nearly foundered, but fortunately escaped into smooth water, another was dashed upon the rocks, and is probably a total wreck; while a third lost her centre-board over a mud bank, where it buried itself, and held the little craft a helpless prisoner; the crew and guests of the latter took to the small boats, pulled three miles in a squall, and were rescued by a pa.s.sing steamer when they were all drenched to the skin, and well-nigh exhausted.

You see that inland yachting is not child's play, nor are these inland yachts without their romantic records. The flag of the San Francisco yacht club has floated among the South Sea Islands; one of its boats has beaten the German and English types in their own waters; one has been as far as the Australian seas; one is a pearl fisher in the Gulf of California, and another is coquetting with the doldrums along the Mexican coast. They are staunch little beauties all, and it would be neither courteous nor healthful to think otherwise in the presence of inland yachtsmen.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Telegraph Hill, 1855]

IN YOSEMITE SHADOWS

"Yosemite, Sept.--: Come at once--the year wanes; would you see the wondrous transformation, the embalming of the dead Summer in windings of purple and gold and bronze--come quickly, before the white pall covers it--delay no longer. The waters are low and fordable, the snows threaten, but the hours are yet propitious; and such a welcome waits you as Solomon in all his glory could not have lavished on Sheba's approaching queen. * * *"

There was much more of the same sort of high-toned epistolary rhetoric, written and sent by a dear hand, whose fanciful pen seemed touched by the ambrosial tints of Autumn. So the year was going out in a gorgeous carnival, before the Lent-like solemnity of Winter was a.s.sumed.

I had only two things to consider now: First, was it already too late to hasten thither, and enjoy the splendid spectacle so freely offered and so alluring; secondly, could I, if yet in time, venture so boldly upon the edge of Winter, and risk the possibility--nay, probability--of being snow-bound for four or six months, 30 miles from any human habitation?

I did not long consider. I felt every moment that the soul of Summer was pa.s.sing. I scented the ascending incense of smoking and crackling boughs. What a requiem was being chanted by all the tremulous and broken voices of Nature! Would I, could I, longer forbear to join the pa.s.sionate and tumultuous _miserere_? It seemed that I could not, for gathering about me the voluminous furs of Siberia, I bade adieu to friends, not without some forebodings awakened by the admonitions of my elders, then, dropping all the folly of the world, like a monk I went silently and alone into the monastery of a Sierran solitude, resigned, trusting, prayerful.

What an entering it was! With slow, devotional steps I approached the valley. There was a thin veil of snow over the upper trail. It was smooth and unbroken as I came upon it, following the blazed trees in my way. Footprints of bear and fox, squirrel and coyote, were traceable.

The owl hooted at me, and the jay shot past me like a blue flash of light, uttering her prolonged, shrill cry. As for the owl, I could not see him, but I heard him at startling intervals give the challenge, "Who are you?" so I advanced and gave the countersign. I don't believe it was for his grave face alone that the owl was chosen symbol of Wisdom.

Not too soon came the steep and perilous descent into the abysmal depths of the mountain fastness. It is a shame that pilgrims who come up thither do not time their steps so as to reach this _Ultima Thule_ of old times and ways at sunset. Then the magnificence of the spectacle culminates. That new world below there is illuminated with the soft tints of Eden. What unutterable fullness of beauty pervades all. The forests--those moss-like fields are forests, and mighty ones, too--are all aflame with the burnished gold of sunset, brightening the gold of autumn; for gold twice refined, as it were, gilds the splendid landscape. Only think of that picture, s.h.i.+ning through the mellow haze of Indian Summer, and flas.h.i.+ng with the lambent glimmer of a myriad gla.s.sy leaves. You can not see them moving, yet they twinkle incessantly, and the warm air trembles about them while you hang bewildered from a toppling parapet, four thousand feet above them; birds swing under you in mid-air, streams leap from the sharp cliff, and reel in that sickening way through the air that your brain whirls after them.

One is tired, anyhow, by the time he has reached this far, and a night camp in the cool rim of this world-to-come is just the panacea for any sort of weariness.

Take my advice: Sleep on it, and drop down on the wings of the morning, while the sun is filling up this marvelous ravine with such lights and shadows as are felt, yet scarcely understood. Refreshed, amazed, bewildered, go down into that solemn place, and see if you are not more saint-like than you dared to think yourself. When the times are out of joint, as they frequently are, come up here, forget men and things; don't imagine we are as bad as we seem, for it is quite certain we might be a great deal worse if we tried. While you bemoan our earthliness, you may not be the one saint among us. Coming down with the evening, I was scarcely at the gates of the inner valley when night was on me. Of this gate, it is formed of a ponderous monument on the right, called Cathedral Rock, and on the left is the one bald spot in the Sierras, the great El Capitan. The arch over this primeval threshold is the astral dome of heaven, and the gates stand ever open. There is no toll taken in any mansion of my Father's House, and this is one of them. Pa.s.sing to the door of my host, I lifted the latch noiselessly. Before me dawned fresh experiences. At my back Night gathered deeper than ever, and all around I seemed to read the rubric of Life's new lesson.

We are a comfort to ourselves--six of us, all told. Summer invites our little company into a breezy hotel, over in the shadow across the valley. Winter suggests a log cabin, an expansive fireplace, plenty of hickory, and as much suns.h.i.+ne as finds its way into our secluded hermitage. So we are done up compactly, in between thick walls, our hard finish being in the shape of mud cakes in the c.h.i.n.ks of the logs, and a very hard finish it is; but we take wondrous comfort withal.

How do I pa.s.s the hours? Leaving my friends, I wander forth, after breakfast, in any direction that pleases me. Take today this sheep path; it leads me to a pebbly beach at a swift turn of the Merced. That clump of trees produces the best harvest of frost-pointed leaves; there are new varieties offered every day at an alarming sacrifice, and I invest largely in these fragile wares. Tomorrow, I shall go yonder across three tumultuous streams, upon three convenient logs, broad and mossy. Some book or other goes with me, and is opened now and then. Such books as Plant Life, The s.e.xuality of Nature, Studies in Animal Life, suggest themselves. Open these anywhere, and each is annotated and ill.u.s.trated by the scene before me. Every page is a running text to the hour I glorify.

Perhaps a leaf falls into my lap as I sit over the brook, on a log--a single leaf, gilded about its border, in the centre a crimson flush, fast swallowing up the original greenness; the whole will presently be bronzed and sombre. O, Leaf! how art thou mummified! We do not think of these little things of Nature. Look at this leaf. What is its record?

How many generations, think you, are numbered in its ancestry? A perpetual intermarriage has not weakened its fibres. The anatomy of this leaf is perfect, and the sap of this oak flows from oak to acorn, from acorn to oak, in an interminable and uninterrupted succession since the first day. What are your t.i.tles and estates beside this representative?

What is your heraldry, with its two centuries of mold; your absurd and confused genealogies, your escutcheons, blotted no doubt with crimes and errors, when this scion, which I am permitted to entertain for a moment, comes of a race whose record is spotless and without stain through ten thousand eventful years. Why, Eve would recognize the original of this stock from the mere family resemblance.

Do you think these days tiresome? It is embarra.s.sing for some people to be left alone with themselves. They can no longer play a part, for there are none like themselves to play to. The sun and stars know you well enough--most likely, better than you yourselves do. I like this. I would out and say to myself: "Here is a confidant. Day hides nothing from me, or you; it expresses all, exposes all--even that which we might not ask to see. It is best that we should see it; there are no errors in Nature."

Walking, the squirrel nods to me. I nod back; and why shouldn't I?

Nature has familiarly introduced us. Squirrel munches under his tail canopy till I am out of sight, jabbering all the while. What sage little fellows go on four feet! I believe an animal has all the instincts of Adam. He should never be tamed, however, lest he lose his ident.i.ty.

Civilization rubs down the points in our character. As the surf rounds the pebble, the ma.s.ses round us. We are polished and insufferably proper, but have no angles left! It is the angles that give the diamond its l.u.s.tre.

Are you hungry? When the index of shadow points out from the base of old Sentinel Rock and touches that column of descending spray they call Yosemite, I go to dinner. "The Fall of the Yosemite"--what a dream it is. A dream of the lotus-eaters, and an aspiration of the Ideal in Nature. You can not realize it; and yet, you will never forget it. Don't take it too early in the Spring, when it is less ethereal--nay, somewhat heavy; rather see it in summer after the rains, or in autumn, better than all, when it is like a tissue of diamond dust shaken upon the air.

It really seems a labor for it to reach its foaming basin, it is so filmy, spiritual, delicate. The very air wooes it from its perpetual leap; sudden currents of wind catch it up and whirl it away in their arms, a trembling captive, or dash it against the solemn and sad-looking rock, where it clings for a moment, then trickles down the scarred and rugged face of it, fading in its descent; sometimes it is waved back by the elements, and almost seems to return into its cloudy nest up yonder close under the sky. It only comes to us at last by impulses, and all along its s.h.i.+ning and vapory path rockets of spray shoot out like pendants, dissolving singly and alone.

But "to return to our muttons." My dial says 12 M. There is no winding up and down of weights here; 12 M. it undoubtedly is, and mutton waits.

These muttons were begotten here of muttons begotten here to the third or fourth generation. Their wool is clipped, larded, and spun here by one who lives here and loves this valley. These mittens, that keep the frost from my fingers, are among the comforting results of this domestic economy. In the cabin, by the fireplace, stands the old-fas.h.i.+oned spinning wheel; and the old-fas.h.i.+oned body who manipulates the wool so skillfully is the light of our little household. The shadow has struck twelve from old Sentinel; and I take the sun once a day, and no oftener.

A cool, bracing air, a sharp run over the meadows, for I see the hostess waving a signal at me for my tardiness, and I am hungry on my own account--such cliffs and vistas as one sees here make one hollow with looking at them, and are calculated to keep a supply of appet.i.te on hand. Do you like good long strips of baked squash? How do you fancy bowls of warm milk--milk that declares a creamy dividend before morning?

Here is a fine fowl of our own raising--one that has seen Yosemite in its glory and in its gloom; it ought to be good eating, and I can affirm that it is. That's a dinner for you, and one where you can begin on pie the first thing, if your soul craves it, which it frequently does.

A storm brewing, and rain in the lower valley. Never mind, there is no hurry here; one blushes to be caught worrying in the august presence of these mountains.

What can I do this stormy afternoon? Stop within doors and sit at the window; a small grossbeak overhead, and we two looking out upon the rain and fog. It is a mile nearly to that wall opposite, but look up high as I can from my window I see no strip of sky. Here is a precipice of homely, almost hideous-looking rock, and above it a hanging garden; those pines in that garden are a hundred feet and more in height: measure the second cliff by their proportions--how far is it, think you, to the garden above? A thousand feet, perhaps; and three, four--no, six of these terraces before you touch blue sky. Oh, what a valley! and where else under heaven are we sunk forty fathoms deep in shadow? But the sun is up yet, and there floats an eagle in its golden ray. I like to watch the last beams burn out in that upper gallery among the pines.

There is a moment given us at sunset when we may partly realize the inexpressible sweetness of the eternal day that is promised us--a dim, religious light. There is no screen or tint soft enough to render the effect perfectly. Only these few seconds at sunset seem to hint something of its surpa.s.sing tenderness.

What cloud effects! Look up!--a break in the heavens, and beyond it the shoulder of a peak weighing some billions of tons, but afloat now, as soft in outline as the mists that envelop it. What ma.s.ses of clouds tumble in upon us! The sky is obscured, night is declared at once, and the fowls go to roost at three P.M. How is the Fall in this weather? A silver braid dropped from one cloud to another. Its strands parted and joined again, lost and found in its own element. Leaping from its dizzy eyrie in the clouds, itself most cloud-like, it is lost in a whirlwind of foam. Now it is as a voice heard faintly above the wind, borne hither and thither. Long, stinging nights, plenty of woolen blankets, and delicious sleep. Then the evenings, so cosy around the fire. H---- reads Scott; we listen and comment. Baby is abed long ago--little Baby, four years old, born here also; knowing nothing of the beautiful world save what is gathered in this gallery of beauties. Such a queer little child, left to herself, no doubt thinking she is the only little one in existence, contented to teeter for hours on a plank by the woodpile, making long explorations by herself and returning, when we are all well frightened, with a pocketful of lizards and a wasp in her fingers; always talking of horned toads and heifers; not afraid of snakes, not even the rattlers; mocking the birds when she is happy, and growling bear-fas.h.i.+on to express her disapproval of any thing.

When the snows come, there will be avalanches by day and night, rus.h.i.+ng into all parts of the valley. The Hermit hears a rumbling in the clouds, as he hoes his potatoes. He looks; a granite pilaster, hewn out by the hurricanes centuries ago, at last grown weary of clinging to that precipitous bluff, lets go its hold, and is dashed from crag to crag in a prolonged and horrible suicide. A pioneer once laid him out a garden, and marked the plan of his cellar; he was to begin digging the next day: that night, there leaped a boulder from under the brow of this cliff right into the heart of the plantation. It dug his cellar for him, but he never used it. It behooved him and others to get farther out from the mountain that found this settler too familiar, and sent a random shot as a sufficient hint to the intruder.

In the trying times when the world was baking, what agony these mountains must have endured. You see it in their faces, they are so haggard and old-looking: time is swallowed up in victory, but it was a desperate duel. There is a dome here that the ambitious foot of man has never attempted. Tissayac allows no such liberty. Look up at that rose-colored summit! The sun endows it with glory long after twilight has shut us in. We are cheated of much daylight here--it comes later and goes earlier with us; but we get hints of brighter hours, both morning and evening, from those sparkling minarets now decked with snowy arabesques. I have seen our canopy, the clouds, so crimsoned at this hour that the valley seemed a grand oriental pavilion, whose silken roof was illuminated with a million painted lamps. The golden woods of Autumn detract nothing from the bizarre effect of the spectacle. To be sure, these walls are rather sombre for a festival, but the sun does what it can to enliven them, whilst the flame-colored oaks and blood-spotted azaleas projecting on all sides from the shelving rocks resemble to a startling degree galleries of blazing candelabra. Night dispels this illusion, it is so very deep and mysterious here. The solemn procession of the stars silently pa.s.ses over us. I see Taurus pressing forward, and anon Orion climbs on hand and knee over the mountain in hot pursuit.

Does it tire you to look so long at a gigantic monument? I do not wonder. The secret of self-esteem seems to lie in regarding our inferiors; therefor let us talk of this frog. I have heard his chorus a thousand times in the dark. His is one of the songs of the night. Just watch him in the meadow pool. See the contentment in his double chin; he flings out three links of hind leg and carries his elbows akimbo; his att.i.tudes are unconstrained; he is entirely without affectation; life never bores him; he keeps his professional engagements to the letter, and sings nightly through the season, whether hoa.r.s.e or not.

It is a good plan to portion off the glorious vistas of Yosemite, allotting so many surprises to each day. Take, for instance, the ten miles of valley, and pa.s.sing slowly through the heart of it, allow a tableau for every three hundred yards. You are sure of this variety, for the trail winds among a galaxy of snowy peaks. Turn as you choose, it is either a water-fall at a new angle, a cliff in profile, a reflection in river or lake--the sudden appearance of the supreme peak of all, or ravine, canon, cavern, pine opening, grove or prairie. There is a point from which you may count over a hundred rocky fangs, tearing the clouds to tatters. I can not tell you the exact location of this terrific climax of savage beauty; try to find it, and perhaps discover half a dozen as singular scenic combinations for yourself. See all that you are told must be seen, then go out alone and discover as much more for yourself, and something no doubt dearer to your memory than any of the more noted haunts. "See Mirror Lake on a still morning," they said to me. I saw it, but went again in the evening, and saw a vision that the reader may not expect to have reflected here. It was the picture of the morning--so softened and refined a veil of enchantment seemed thrown over it. Hamadryad or water nymph could not have startled me at that moment: they belonged there, and were looked for. I shall hardly again renew those impressions; it was all so unexpected, and one is not twice surprised in the same manner. That wondrous amphitheatre was for once made cheerful with the broad, horizontal bars of fire that s.h.i.+fted about it, yet all its lights were mellowed in the purpling mists of evening, and the whole was pictured in little on the surface of the lake. There was nothing earthly visible, I thought then, for every thing seemed transfigured, floating in a lucent atmosphere. It was the hour when the birds are silent for the s.p.a.ce of one intense moment, stopping with one accord--perhaps holding their breath till the spell is broken. As I stood entranced, a large golden leaf, ready and willing to die, let go its hold on the top bough of a tree overhanging the water. From twig to twig it swung. I heard every sound in its fall till it was out of the congregation of its fellows, turning over and over in mid-air, sailing toward the centre of the lake. There it hung on the rim of that stainless crystal, while a thin ring of silver light noiselessly expanded toward the sh.o.r.e. The sun was down. All the birds of heaven said so with their bubbling throats. Bewildered with the delicious conclusion of this ill.u.s.tration of still life, I turned homeward, dispelling the mirage. Then such a ride home in the keen air, while a pillar of smoke rose over the little cabin, telling me which of the hundred bowers of autumn sheltered my nest.

But, again and again, I have seen all. Pohono has breathed upon me with its fatal breath, yet I survive. It is said that three Indian girls were long ago bewitched by its waters, and now their perturbed spirits haunt the place. Those perfectly round rainbows may form the nimbus for each of the martyrs; they, at any rate, look supernatural enough for such an office. The wildly wooded pa.s.s to the Vernal and Nevada Falls has echoed to my tread. I have been sprayed upon till my spirit is never dry of the life-giving waters that flow so freely. But I am just a little tired of all this. I begin to breathe short, irregular breaths. The soul of this mighty solitude oppresses me; I want more air of the common sort, and less wisdom in daily talks and walks. I remember the pleasant nonsense of life over the mountains, and sigh for those flesh-pots of Egypt once in a while. These rocks are full of texts and teachings--these cliffs are tables of stone, graven with laws and commandments. I read everywhere mysterious cyphers and hieroglyphics; every changing season offers to me a new palimpsest. I do not quite like to play here; I dare not be simple; I'm altogether too good to last long. How many thousand ascensions have been made in these wors.h.i.+pful days, I wonder; not merely getting the body on to the tops of these wonderful peaks, but going thither in spirit, as when the soul goes up into the mountains to pray?

This eye-climbing is as fatiguing and perilous as any. I feel the want of some pure blue sky.

A few farewell rambles a.s.sociate themselves with packing up and plans of desertion. Not sad farewells in this case, for if I never again meet these individual mountains, I carry with me their memory, eternal and incomparably glorious. Let us peep into this nook: I got plentiful blackberries there in the spring, together with stains and th.o.r.n.y scratches. I haul myself over the ferry and back, for old acquaintance'

sake; the current is so lazy, it seems incredible that the same waters are almost impa.s.sable at some seasons. I succeed in wrecking a whole armada of floating leaves with stems like a bowsprit. A few beetles take pa.s.sage in these gilded barges--no doubt, for the antipodes.

Did you ever drive up the cattle at milking time? I have; but not without endless trial and tribulation, for they spill off the path on either side in a very remarkable way, and when I rush after one with a flank movement, the column breaks and falls back utterly demoralized. A little strategy on the part of their commander (which is myself) triumphs in the end, for I privately reconstruct and march them all up in detachments of one. I look after the little trees, the unbent twigs; they are more interesting to me than your monsters. This nursery of saplings sprang up in a night after a freshet: here are quivering aspens trembling forever in penance for that one sin. They once were gravely pointed out by the guide of a party of tourists as "shuddering asps." He is doubtless the same who, being asked "what that was," (pointing to the North Dome, six thousand feet in the air) said "he'd be hanged if he knew; some k.n.o.b or other." I recall ten thousand pleasant times as I turn my face seaward; not only the great and omnipotent shadows under the south wall of the valley, nor the continuous canticles of the waters, but innumerable little things that fill up and make life perfect.

The talks, the walks with my friends here, the parrot "Sultan," fed daily from the table, soliloquizing upon men and things in Arabic and Hindostanee, for he scorns English and talks in his sleep. There is _Bobby_, the grossbeak, brought to the door in pin feathers and skin like oiled silk by an Indian. His history is tragic: this Indian brained the whole family and an a.s.sortment of relatives; Bobby alone remaining to brood over the ma.s.sacre, was sold into bondage for two bits and a tin dipper without the bottom. The sun seems to lift his gloom, for he sings a little, sharpens his bill with great gusto and tomahawks a bit of fruit, as though dealing vengeance upon the destroyer of his race.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite, in 1869]

When shall I see another such cabin as this--its great fireplaces, and the loft heaping full of pumpkins? O, Yosemite! O, halcyon days, and bed-time at eight P.M., tucking in for ten good hours and up again at six; good eatings and drinkings day by day, mugs of milk and baked squash forever, plenty of b.u.t.ter to our daily bread; letters at wide intervals, and long, uninterrupted "thinks" about home and friends (as the poet of the "Hermitage" writes in one of his letters). Shall I ever again sit for two mortal hours hearing a housefly buzz in the window and thinking it a pleasant voice! But alas! those restless days, when the air was full of driving leaves and I could find nothing on earth to comfort me.

I leave this morning. Opportunity takes me by the hand and leads me away. The heart leaps with emotion: everything is momentous in a quiet life. This is the portal we entered one deepening dusk. Its threshold will soon be cus.h.i.+oned with snow; let us hasten on. If I were asked when is the time to visit Yosemite, I should reply: Go in the spring; see the freshets and the waterfalls in their glory, and the valley in its fresh and vivid greenness. Go again, by all means, in the autumn, when the woods are powdered with gold dust and a dreamy haze sleeps in the long ravines; when the stars sparkle like crystals and the mornings are frosty; when the clouds visit us in person, and the trees look like crayon sketches on a vapory background, and the cliffs like leaning towers traced in sepia on a soft ground gla.s.s. Go in spring and autumn, if possible. I should choose autumn of the two; but go at any hazard, and do not rest till you have been. You can enter and go out at this portal. Pa.s.sing seaward, to the left, out of the gray and groping mists a form, arises, monstrous and awful in its proportions; spurning the very earth that crumbles at its very base as it towers to heaven. The vapors of the air cleave to its ma.s.sive front. The pa.s.sing cloud is caught and torn in the grand carvings of its capitals. Gaze upon it in the solemnity of its sunlit surface. Impressive, impa.s.sive, magnetic; having a pulse and the organs of life almost; terrible as the forehead of a G.o.d. The full splendor of the noonday can not belittle it, night can not compa.s.s it. The moon is paler in its presence and wastes her lamp, the stars are hidden and lost over and beyond it. Across the face of it is borne forever the shadowy semblance of a swift and flying figure. Despair and desperation are in the nervous energy depicted in this marvelous medallion. Surely, the Indian may look with a degree of reverence upon that picture, painted by the morning light, fading in the meridian day, and gone altogether by evening. A grand etching of colossal proportions, representing the great chief Tutochanula in his mysterious flight. The Wandering Jew might look upon it and behold his traditional beard and flowing robes blown here by the winds in the rapidity of his desperate haste. It is the last one sees of the valley, as it is the last any have seen of Tutochanula. He fled into the west, cycles ago, and I follow him now into the west, nest-building, and getting into the shadow and resting after the door of the mountain is pa.s.sed, and my soul no longer beats impetuously against those stormy walls.

With uncovered head, having nothing between me and Saturn, wiser, I trust, for my intercourse with these masters, purer in heart and holier for my prolonged vigil, with careful and reverential steps I pa.s.s out of Yosemite shadows.

AN AFFAIR OF THE MISTY CITY

I.

WHAT THE MOON SHONE ON

She was a smallish moon, looking very chaste and chilly and she peered vaguely through folds of scurrying fog. She shone upon a silent street that ran up a moderate hill between far-scattered corporation gas-lamps--a street that having reached the hill top seemed to saunter leisurely across a height which had once been the most aristocratic quarter of the Misty City; the quarter was still pathetically respectable, and for three squares at least its handsome residences stared destiny in the face and stood in the midst of flower-bordered lawns, unmindful of decay. Its fountains no longer played; even its once pampered children had grown up, and the young of the present generation were of a different cast; but the street seemed not to heed these changes; indeed it was growing a little careless of itself and needed replanking. Was it a realization of this fact, I wonder, that caused it on a sudden to run violently down a steep place into the Bay, as if it were possessed of Devils? Well it might be, for the human sc.u.m of the town gathered about the base of the hill, and the nights there were unutterably iniquitous.

O that pale watcher, the Moon! She shone on a rude stairway leading up to the bare face of a cliff that topped the hill; and five and forty uncertain steps that had more than once slid down into the street below along with the wreckage of the winter rains, for the cliff was of rock and clay and though the rock may stand until the crack of Doom, the clay mingles with the elements and an annual mud pudding, tons in weight, was deposited on the pavement of the high street, to the joy of the juveniles and the grief of the belated pedestrians. The cliff towering at the junction of the two thoroughfares shared with each its generous mud-flow and half of it descended in lavalike cascades into the depths of a ravine that crossed the high street at right angles, pa.s.sing under a bridge still celebrated as a triumph of architectural ungainliness.

She shone, my Lady Moon, into that deep ravine which was half filled with shadow and made a weird picture of the place; it seemed like the bed of some dark noiseless river, the source of which was still undiscovered; and as for its mouth, no one would ever find it, or, finding, tell of it, for the few who trusted themselves to its voiceless and invisible current were heard of no more; sometimes a sharp cry for help pierced the midnight silence, and it was known upon the hill that murder was being done down yonder--that was all. Yet day by day the great tide of traffic poured through this subterranean pa.s.sage, with m.u.f.fled roar as of a distant sea.

She shone on all that was left of a once beautiful and imposing mansion.