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Page 2
XIX. They fight the Serapis.
XX. The Shuttle
XXI. Samson among the Philistines
XXII. Something further of Ethan Allen; with Israel's flight towards the
wilderness
XXIII. Israel in Egypt
XXIV. Continued
XXV. In the City of Dis
XXVI Forty-five years
XXVII. Requiescat in pace
ISRAEL POTTER
Fifty Years of Exile
CHAPTER I.
THE BIRTHPLACE OF ISRAEL.
The traveller who at the present day is content to travel in the good
old Asiatic style, neither rushed along by a locomotive, nor dragged by
a stage-coach; who is willing to enjoy hospitalities at far-scattered
farmhouses, instead of paying his bill at an inn; who is not to be
frightened by any amount of loneliness, or to be deterred by the
roughest roads or the highest hills; such a traveller in the eastern
part of Berkshire, Massachusetts, will find ample food for poetic
reflection in the singular scenery of a country, which, owing to the
ruggedness of the soil and its lying out of the track of all public
conveyances, remains almost as unknown to the general tourist as the
interior of Bohemia.
Travelling northward from the township of Otis, the road leads for
twenty or thirty miles towards Windsor, lengthwise upon that long broken
spur of heights which the Green Mountains of Vermont send into
Massachusetts. For nearly the whole of the distance, you have the
continual sensation of being upon some terrace in the moon. The feeling
of the plain or the valley is never yours; scarcely the feeling of the
earth. Unless by a sudden precipitation of the road you find yourself
plunging into some gorge, you pass on, and on, and on, upon the crests
or slopes of pastoral mountains, while far below, mapped out in its
beauty, the valley of the Housatonie lies endlessly along at your feet.
Often, as your horse gaining some lofty level tract, flat as a table,
trots gayly over the almost deserted and sodded road, and your admiring
eye sweeps the broad landscape beneath, you seem to be Bootes driving in
heaven. Save a potato field here and there, at long intervals, the whole
country is either in wood or pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep are the
principal inhabitants of these mountains. But all through the year lazy
columns of smoke, rising from the depths of the forest, proclaim the
presence of that half-outlaw, the charcoal-burner; while in early spring
added curls of vapor show that the maple sugar-boiler is also at work.
But as for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of it here.
At any rate, no man by that means accumulates a fortune from this thin
and rocky soil, all whose arable parts have long since been nearly
exhausted.
Yet during the first settlement of the country, the region was not
unproductive. Here it was that the original settlers came, acting upon
the principle well known to have regulated their choice of site, namely,
the high land in preference to the low, as less subject to the
unwholesome miasmas generated by breaking into the rich valleys and
alluvial bottoms of primeval regions. By degrees, however, they quitted
the safety of this sterile elevation, to brave the dangers of richer
though lower fields. So that, at the present day, some of those mountain
townships present an aspect of singular abandonment. Though they have
never known aught but peace and health, they, in one lesser aspect at
least, look like countries depopulated by plague and war. Every mile or
two a house is passed untenanted. The strength of the frame-work of
these ancient buildings enables them long to resist the encroachments of
decay. Spotted gray and green with the weather-stain, their timbers seem
to have lapsed back into their woodland original, forming part now of
the general picturesqueness of the natural scene. They are of
extraordinary size, compared with modern farmhouses. One peculiar
feature is the immense chimney, of light gray stone, perforating the
middle of the roof like a tower.
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