I JMWMMItOllllllllllMI— l«IIIW»iMHW»MHI»»WMn»»WI«m« GNADENSEE ACOI PICTURE UT FRAME f:;id WAR-D o. dye:r ILLUSTRATED j i 1 :■ '■II 1 I Mm !: iiii ! 1 II iiliiii mi iiil: ■:i ill ill! iiiiii iliiii Class / ' _. 'TT^ Book 3 5'3 11^- CopyrightN" COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. GNADENSEE GNADENSEE THE LAKE OF GRACE A MORAVIAN PICTURE IN A CONNECTICUT FRAME BY EDWARD O. DYER With Illustrations BOSTON Xlbe pilatlm press CHICAGO THE LiBRARY OF CONGRESS, Two Copies Received JUN 4 '<^03 ^ Copyiight tntiy CLASS CU XXc No h I 1 ! COPY B. . No J Copyright, 1903 By Edward O. Dyer Press of J. J. Arakelyan, 295 Congress St., Boston ^ 0^ ,..^^ TO MY WIFE Whose Window in the Sharon Manse Looks out on that Mountain Which looks down on the Lake of Grace This Souvenir of our Sharon Life 1f6 DeMcate& CONTENTS PART I.— THE PICTURE Preface 9 Poem, Gnadensee 13 The Indian Villages and Lands 15 Unitas Fratrum 27 A Count and Saint 2i7 The Mission at Gnadensee 49 A Baron and Countess at the Lake .... 57 A Wequadnach Letter 6^^ The Heart of Bruce 69 Apostolic Succession 79 The Monument 87 A Window in Bethlehem 97 The Higher Patriotism 11 1 Along the Sharon Shore 119 PART II.— THE FRAME The Stairs of Gnadensee 127 The Soul of the Pines 147 An Old Ore Bed 159 A Village Street 173 A Pastor of the Church Militant . . . -195 Shekomeko 203 The Reservation at Scatacook 211 The Webotuck Valley 223 The Lost Brook and the Fountain of Youth . 239 Troutbeck 251 The Alandar Trail 263 The Lake Country of Connecticut .... 277 Echoes and Ripples 287 PREFACE Gibbon tells us that it was at Rome, as he sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first came to him. The present modest book was written because its author was charmed by the sound and meaning of the name which stands as its title. Upon investigation, that name opened up a story of rare interest, — revealed char- acters which are the crystallization and quintessence of love and faith. Because the name and the story set them- selves into a beautiful country it was impossible not to describe that also. The picturesque scenery of Connecticut is concentrated in its northwestern corner. Mountain, lake and river blend into a region of rugged grandeur and pastoral beauty ; legend and history are not lacking. Three states meet in this borderland — great commonwealths, whose influence is the country's destiny. This borderland is the frame of the picture. The book is in two parts, but the axis of the whole is the Lake of Grace. The first part is the history and study of an old mis- sion, a chapter in church history which is well-nigh for- gotten and was long neglected. The spot may not equal lona in importance, but it was part of a movement which surpassed it in heroism and the influence of whose conse- cration we still feel and shall always need. The second part is descriptive and briefly biographical, a memory of outings with interpretation and suggestion. There are always those who long to know and do new things, who frame the common into some ideal relation they have discovered. This part was written for them and for that shifting, restless, ever-growing tourist-class which yearly seeks these hills and mountains. Nor is it altogether presumption to seek to awaken a stronger, deeper love for what we always had, but never really knew as native resi- dents. It is most earnestly hoped that both parts of the book and all of its chapters may be stones of memorial to pre- serve fast-vanishing memories and traditions. With that hope, these pages are given to the local and to the larger public. PART I THE PICTURE GNADENSEE Lake beneath Poconnuck sleeping. Mirror of his double crown. Jewel that some sachem misses From his bright belt falling down, Pure white lilies round thee circle. Thy face is by the blue sky kissed, Thou art set in pearl and opal With a central amethyst. Lake "extending to the mountain," Wequadnach, in the Indian tongue. Name writ oft in lore of missions. Thou hast merit left unsung. Where now sigh the scattered pine trees, Once the Indian wigwams stood. And the dead were buried near them. On the shore and in the wood. Hither came Baron de Watteville, On his holy mission glad, David Bruce, the Indian teacher. Nobler knight than Galahad, O'er the pallid lake they rowed him, White as samite was his shroud, Indian converts who had loved him. And who wept and sobbed aloud — O'er his grave a marble sentry. In it cut some unknown years, Where the winds and waves are wailing. And the heart is full of tears. GNADENSEE These were not the Minnesingers, Swabian songs of love and youth, But an exiled, ancient people, With their holy hymns of truth. On bleak mountains they had sung them, At the stake in fire and blood, Greenland's shores were now to listen, And these red men of the wood. Where the Southern Cross is bending Lustrous o'er the Carib Sea, Slaves can hear the praise ascending Of a solemn litany. Gone are all our poor distinctions, Breath of fame and pride of birth; Love has found his throne and scepter. Men are brothers round the earth. Lake upon New England's border, With a fair Moravian name. Unto which, across the ocean, Saintly souls in longing came. There are ripples on thy water. There are echoes on thy shore, Which, once started, never leave us, But go on forevermore; For they touch the soul of being, Stirring depths far out of sight, Heard across life's dim, low levels. Sounds like voices in the night — Not these known and living voices. Speaking through the wires in air. But a deeper, holier message From the wireless worlds afar. Gnadensee, thou gem of beauty, Gnadensee, thou Lake of Grace, To the stranger tell thy story. To the lover show thy face. THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS At the foot of Indian Mountain, lying partly in the town of Sharon, Connecticut, is one of those many lakes which make this region a landscape of renown. As one climbs the mountain and looks down he sees that there are two lakes beneath its shaggy brow. They are on opposite sides and seem like eyes through which the soul of beauty looks up at the mountain and the stars. 'Tis hard to tell which is the fairer or which the mountain loves the most. The Indians had villages upon each of them, but seem to have preferred the western one inas- much as their principal village was upon its shore. They called this lake and the village Wequadnach, but left the other nameless, left it to the sighing sedge, the water-fowl and that commercial spirit of these latter days which has erected a grist-mill and an electric light factory at its outlet. There can be no doubt about these villages at 17 GNADENSEE the foot of Indian Mountain. The Rev. Cotton Mather Smith, who was pastor of the Congrega- tional Church in Sharon for over fifty years, having been ordained in 1755, sent in 1800 to Benjamin Trumbull, the historion of Connecticut, the follow- ing information concerning the location and size of the villages : "Previous to the settlement already mentioned," — evidently the settlement of the town which be- gan in the spring of 1739 with the arrival of from fourteen to twenty families from Colchester and Lebanon, — "there were between two and three hundred Indians that resided in the Northwest part of the town in two villages ; the one by the side of a large pond, now known by the name of In- dian Pond, which consisted of about twenty-five wigwams ; the other village was situated in a large meadow at the south end of a large pond, now known by the name of Mudge Pond, containing about ten or fifteen huts or wigwams." The Rev. Sheldon Davis, an Episcopal clergyman who care- fully investigated the antiquities of Duchess County, New York, in a pamphlet published in 1858, says, "Another portion formed a colony at Wechquatnach, on the eastern border of Indian Pond, in the town of Sharon, Conn." This colony, 18 THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS we learn, was caused by the breaking up later of the Indian settlement at Shekomeko, so that orig- inally and afterwards there was a very considerable village here on the shore of Indian Pond. Tra- dition has handed down what the oldest inhabitants repeat, that on the Millerton Road, not far from an old ore bed at the foot of Indian Mountain, was the Indian village. Here arrow heads used to be found and in the meadow by the lake Indian skulls have been ploughed up. We need not then view these Indians through the haze of myth or legend. Here they had a local habitation and a name. Here were clearings for their cornfields, here in the Sharon ponds they fished, here wound their paths below the mountain and here among the fragrant pines curled the smoke of their wigwams. The Rev. Cotton Mather Smith further says : "These Indians were of a superior size, and prob- ably part of the Stockbridge tribe." They must then have been Mohicans, a part of the great Al- gonquin family, a family which in intelligence and physical qualities stands among the first of the North American Indians. Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, translated the Bible into a dialect which these Sharon Indians would have had no difficulty in understanding. That longest word in his Bible 19 GNADENSEE (Mark i : 40), Wutappesittukqussunnoohzvehtunkquoh, which means kneehng down to him, they doubtless understood, Jonathan Edwards, the younger, understood this Mohican language perfectly. He loved it, thought in it; it became more familiar to him, he tells us, than his mother tongue. His boyhood spent at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, resulted in a most val- uable paper on the Mohican language. He has written out the Lord's Prayer just as these Sharon Indians must have often repeated it, and from his list of Mohican words we see that we have been using Mohican all our life, appropriating words like tomahawk, moccasin, wigwam and Manitou. The stone hatchets and arrow heads found around Indian Pond indicate that these Indians were unacquainted with the use of metals. A white man was a "knife-man." They were in the stone age of development, or rather undevelopment, since it is quite as possible that men have forgotten the knowledge of the useful arts as that they have never known them. The American Indians like all races seem to have had an older and earlier civ- ilization if we can judge by the Mound Builders and the ruins of Aztec temples. The Indians at the foot of Indian Mountain were 20 THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS idolaters. Our clerical informant says, "These In- dians were under the direction of five chiefs called Mughoca. They had an Idol which they wor- shipped as God, and committed to the care of an old squaw. This Idol, though inferior to the great God that governed the world, was nevertheless in- vested with power suflficient to repel those evils brought upon them by Mutonto, or the Devil ; and in case he refused or neglected to afford them as- sistance, they would severely chastise him." This is much like ourselves, who, to escape a difficulty or dilemma are said to whip the devil round the stump. Although idolaters, these Indians were not materialists. They believed in another life, a world of spirit and personality. The name of their village, Wequadnach,' means "place at the end of (or extending to) the moun- tain." The mountain they called Poconnuck, which means "cleared land," that is, land from which the trees and bushes had been removed so as to fit it for cultivation. Land used for planting was either naturally clear or else made so. Land of the latter kind was always calld Poquannoc or Pequonnuc, a *This name is written Wechquadnach frequently. The Moravian missionaries wrote it Wachquatnach, but in this book the spelling of Trumbull, the great authority on In- dian names, is adhered to. 21 GNADENSEE word for which there are various spellings and which is the name of many localities in Connecticut. One of the remarkable finds throwing light on the character of these Indians at Wequadnach was the discovery, at about the time of the writing of this book, of some pottery, bones and shells in a rock shelter near the foot of Indian Mountain on its west side. The collection is undoubtedly In- dian and of great value. There is the frontal bone of a deer or stag, the jaw and teeth of some animal, other longer teeth, pieces of tortoise-shell and the shells of the fresh-water clam. Rarest and most valuable of all, are specimens of broken pottery, showing by no inconsiderable decorative skill that there was in these rude men the love of beauty. Indian pottery is very fragile and rarely found. If this is Indian, as at present seems probable, the find is of much more than local import- ance. Clinging to this region around the lake and mountain is many a tradition of Indian oc- cupation. Although the Indians were never sufficiently numerous to prove dangerous to the safety of the white settlers, they did cause some uneasiness be- cause of a belief that they had been wronged in the sale of their lands. It is charitable to believe 22 THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS that there was some misunderstanding. Sedgwick, in his "History of Sharon" says, "The Colony of Connecticut ever made it a practice to deal justly by the Indian claimants before they attempted to dispose of its lands by settlements." There is a petition to the General Assembly of the Colony, un- der date of May, 1742, in which certain citizens of Sharon together with Stephen Nequitimaugh Nan- hoon, and others of the Indian natives residing in the town, ask that a committee be appointed to examine and inquire into the claims of the Indians. As a result of this petition a committee was ap- pointed which made a long and elaborate report. Believing that the Indians had misunderstood the bargain made with them, the committee recom- mended that a certain quantity of land not ex- ceeding fifty acres be set ofif to them. This does not seem a very generous concession to the lords oif the soil. The trouble arose because the pro- prietors of the town, who were a legal corporation, thought themselves entitled by their purchase to a common and undivided township. They supposed the Indian lands in the northwest part of the town were theirs because a certain Lamb,^ of whom the ^Lamb purchased his extensive Indian rights in Salis- bury and Sharon, for the consideration of eighty pounds and divers victuals and clothes. 23 GNADENSEE purchase was made, had previously bought up the Indian titles. The Indians said they had never sold what Lamb claimed, that he took advantage of their ignorance, defrauded and deceived them. Whatever was sold, they had never bargained away everything, and they now laid claim to ninety acres they had improved and a large part of the moun- tain for fire-wood. This the proprietors were un- willing to grant. As so often happens in this world, the weaker had to take what they could get. One could wish that the proprietors of the town had given the In- dians the mountain they loved, as a reservation for- ever. That would have softened and removed the growing quarrel. The Indians, naturally, were not satisfied. A legal sale, though agreed to, may be unjust in the extreme and even when it is just may break the heart. Who can will away his ancestral acres, go out into the world homeless and alone without a repining that ofttimes is rebellion? The Indians at last deeded away every right to their lands by beautiful Wequadnach. One cannot read that deed unmoved. It is drawn by a master hand. There could be no more dispute. The In^ dian lands were gone forever. Soon after the sale of their lands the Indians 24 THE INDIAN VILLAGES AND LANDS themselves dispersed. Tribal unity and village life were gone. A remnant remained in the town but many went to the Moravian settlements in Pennsyl- vania, to Wyoming and Gnadenhutten (Tents of Grace). Like the leaves of the autumn they had withered away. The spring's renewal might clothe the forest again, but the children of the forest had departed. No curling smoke arose above the tree- tops. The canoes sped no more as of old across the waters of the lake. Oni the eastern shore there is a grove where the carriage drives slowly and one stops to catch the scent of the pines. The south wind in the branches is a sigh and a dirge for these children of nature whose graves are not far away. In the spring the meadow-larks come back as of yore; the hepaticas and the trailing arbutus peep out from under their leafy carpet on Indian Moun- tain, and the Ten Mile River or Webotuck, into which Wequadnach empties, goes singing down its beautiful valley through the alder thickets and green meadows, but Indian eyes look not on this picture of their childhood. In the frosty autumn mornings when the maples blush in scarlet and the white fog curls below Poconnuck or clings to its shaggy side one thinks even more of a lost and vanished race. Those wreathing mists are then the 25 GNADENSEE altar-curtains of the hills or the ghosts of Indian souls, according to the fancy of the beholder. "Sweetest of all childlike dreams In the simple Indian lore Still to me the legend seems Of the shapes who flit before. From the clefts of mountain rocks, Through the dark of lowland firs, Flash the eyes and flow the locks Of the mystic Vanishers ! Fringed with gola their mantles flow On the slopes of westering knolls; In the wind they whisper low Of the Sunset Land of Souls." — Whittier. 26 UNITAS FRATRUM "Ever since I became more intimately acquainted with the Moravians, my inclination to this Society, which had united under the victorious banners of Christ, had con- stantly increased. It is exactly in the moment of its earli- est formation that a positive religion possesses its greatest attraction. On that account it is delightful to go back to the time of the apostles, where all stands forth as fresh and immediately spiritual. And thus it was that the Mo- ravian doctrine acquired something of a magical charm by appearing to continue or rather to perpetuate the condition of those first times." — Autobiography of Goethe. UNITAS FRATRUM It would be a libel upon our Puritan ancestors to say they cared nothing for the salvation of the In- dians. It is a witticism whose injustice still stings to say the first thing they did after landing in the New World was to fall on their knees and the next was to fall on the aborigines. John Robinson's noted wish that they had converted some before they had killed any, the splendid work of Eliot and his praying Indians, the labors of Mayhew and David Brainerd and Jonathan Edwards, Eleazer Wheelock with his Indian School at Lebanon, Con- necticut, the one at Cornwall, with many other achievements, are only the manifestation of a desire whose nobility and success we too feebly praise. It is to the credit of Sharon that the fathers of the town, in the memorial already referred to, peti- tioned the General Assembly of the Colony of Con- necticut in 1742 that the Indians in the township 29 GNADENSEE be instructed in the doctrines of the gospel. But when all is done and said it must be granted that the missionary spirit did not belong to the Puri- tans as a body. The Indians to them were bloody "salvages," pagans, a people to be conquered and dispossessed like the Canaanites of old. The Puri- tan was an Old Testament saint. He did not deeply love the Indian ; the horrors of King Phil- ip's War had made himi too stern and relentless for that. Missionary work was never the first thing with him, but a kind of annex to his political mission and divine election in the world. It is to Herrnhut and Moravia that we must look for the purest examples of missionary zeal. When the first settlers of Sharon were planning to get titles to the lands around Indian Pond, missionaries from over the sea were coming to these same lands, not to possess them but to save the souls of the Indian possessors. They changed the name of the lake from Wequadnach to Gnadensee; gave it a Chris- tian name and baptism. The story of the lake can- not be told without giving a brief history of the Moravian people. It is always interesting to trace a great move- ment back to its source. About the middle of the ninth century Methodius and Cyril, great names in 30 UNITAS FRATRUM religious history, had converte'd parts of Austria to Christianity, translated the Bible into the ver- nacular and introduced a ritual of worship. In Moravia and Bohemia had grown up an old Protes- tant Church whose members were known officially as Unitas Fratrum or The United Brethren. The attempt of Rome to establish ecclesiastical jurisdic- tion over these provinces led to a protest and re- volt. The opposition culminated in the Bohemian Reformation of which John Huss was the distin- guished leader. The Council of Constance con- demned him as a heretic to be burned at the stake, but out of his ashes arose the Brethren's Church. Sixty years before Luther had nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg and one hundred before the Anglican Church was established in England, on the borders of Bohemia and Silesia the proscribed followers of John Huss began to call one another Brethren and to elect their bish- ops. In their rugged mountain cradle these people were subjected to the bitterest persecution. They were called "Pitmen" or "Burrowers." Their condi- tion was like that of the Vaudois in Piedmont, and the Camisards in Southern France. At times they gathered in the intense cold of a Bohemian winter 31 GNADENSEE to read the Scriptures around camp-fires which they did not dare to kindle by day lest the smoke should betray where they were. On the way to their place of worship they would tread one in the steps of another, the last comer dragging a pine branch be- hind him to obliterate the tracks in the snow. At the time of the Reformation four hundred churches with a membership of two hundred thousand ex- isted among the Brethren, who counted in their number many nobles and barons. But the cruel Ferdinand II, who came to the throne of Austria in 1 617, is said to have taken a solemn vow that on receiving the imperial crown he would root out all heresy in his dominions. He had been educated by the Jesuits. His strong anti-Protestant senti- ments allied to a character, gloomy, fanatical and fierce, led him to inaugurate a most relentless per- secution. The Brethren were imprisoned, ban- ished, tortured. Then came the decisive battle of Weisenberg in 1620, which was a victory for the forces of unrighteousness. The extirpation of all the evangelicals was now resolved upon. The army of martyrs received many accessions. No- bles, knights and humbler witnesses for the truth fell beneath the executioner's axe. To harbor an evangelical pastor was a penal offence. Protestant 32 UNITAS FRATRUM Bibles were burned, estates confiscated and the pop- ulation of the province reduced from three millions to eight hundred thousand. More than thirty thou- sand families emigrated. Bohemia became a soli- tude and a waste, suffered as Spain did from the expulsion of the Moors and France from the loss of the Huguenots. By the close of the seventeenth century an observer would have said that Protes- tantism was dead in Bohemia. Publicly it was, but there was a remnant left called "The Hidden Seed." There Is always a holy remnant, a divine election in the world, or society would tumble into chaos, revert to anarchy and barbarism. The last bishop of this old Bohemian Church was Comensky or Comenius, a man of such great piety and zeal for education that he was even sought as a President for Harvard College.^ This man, driven with his flock from his native land, pauses a moment on the summit of the mountains which look down upon ^ "That brave old man Johannes Amos Commenius, the fame of whose worth hath been trumpetted as far as more than three languages (whereof every one is endebted unto his Janua) could carry it was in deed agreed with all, by our Mr. Winthrop in his travels through the low coun- tries, to come over into Nezv England, and illuminate this Colledge and country, in the quality of a President. But the solicitations of the Swedish Ambassador, diverting him another way, that incomparable Moraviati became not an American." — Mather's Magnolia, Vol. II, Book IV. — "The History of Harvard-Colledge." 33 GNADENSEE " " the region he loved, and kneeUng there with his fellow exiles offers a fervent prayer that God would never suffer the light of divine truth to go out in those countries, but would there preserve a seed to serve him. The prayer was answered. Here and there a Bible was hidden in a cellar, in a hol- low log, in a dog-kennel, a secret which the head of the family knew but which he dared to make known to his children only on his death-bed. We are told that at one place on the borders of Hun- gary the farmers were wont every week on Satur- day to go over the boundary and bring back hay in their carts. It was not only hay they brought back, but their pastor concealed in the load, that he might preach to them on the Sabbath. "The Hidden Seed" was scattered by persecu- tion, a method of church extension since apostolic times. Christian David became the Moses of a new Exodus. With Huss, Jerome of Prague and Comenius he is one of the great names in Mora- vian history. He leads the exile bands over the borders into Protestant Saxony. They come to Herrnhut, "The Watch of the Lord." Here they rest, settle and colonize. As the Pilgrim Fathers knelt on the wintry strand at Plymouth and there beneath the ice-crusted pines rolled to heaven their 34 UNITAS FRATRUM psalms of praise, so these Moravian exiles, escaping Jesuit watchfulness and cruelty, would fall on their knees at Herrnhut and sing that hymn their ances- tors had sung a hundred years before. "Bless'd be the day when I must roam Far from my country, friends and home, An exile poor and mean; My fathers' God will be my guide, Will angel guards for me provide, My soul in danger screen; Himself will lead me to a spot, Where, all my cares and griefs forgot, I shall enjoy sweet rest; As pants for cooling streams the hart, I languish for my heavenly part. For God, my refuge blest." The saint in exile, the church in the wilderness, it has always been so from the time Abraham loaded his camels and journeying up the Mesopotamian plain left Ur with its culture and false gods behind. Religious people are nomads, children of the tent and altar. They go forth in pain but go in faith to find a land of promise. The story of Gnadensee cannot be written apart from this great movement behind it. These waves that glisten in the sun and ripple on its shore were stirred from afar. They are an influence even here of an old world faith and love. Carlyle and Emerson once meeting on 35 GNADENSEE the moors of Craigenputtoch, the former said, "Christ died on Calvary ; that brought us togeth- er." Is there any other reason why the Indian and the Moravian met on a Httle lake in the wild forest of North America? why Wequadnach the "place at the foot of the mountain" became Gnadensee the Lake of Grace? 36 A COUNT AND SAINT "JESU GEH VORAN" "Jesus, still lead on, Till our rest be won. And although the way be cheerless We will follow, calm and fearless ; Guide us by thy hand To our Fatherland. If the way be drear. If the foe be near, Let not faithless fears o'ertake us, Let not faith and hope forsake us ; For, through many a foe, To our home we go." — Nicolaus Ludivig Zinzcndorf (1700-1760). A COUNT AND SAINT In the summer of 1742 a man of distinguished appearance, with a piercing but benevolent eye, was making his way through the tangled forests of the New World. He was accompanied by his young and beautiful daughter. She seemed out of place in those dreadful wildernesses, woods and swamps, for she was of gentle blood, but her devo- tion to her father was almost worship and he had called her Benigna from her birth. They had trav- ersed the country from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Esopus, now Kingston, on the Hudson, crossed the river at Rhinebeck and were on their way to an Indian village, a few miles from Wequadnach. They had often heard of the villages in this region and longed to visit them. The walls and turrets of their old world castle, the society of the court, the elegant leisure of letters and wealth were not so attractive as the forest huts of the Indians. 39 GNADENSEE Who was this distinguished traveler and what had brought him hither? Not trade or barter or to ac- quire a manor on the noble river he had crossed. His long journey across the ocean and through the wilderness was purely a religious one, that he might organize and direct missionary work in North America, unify and harmonize the churches there. It is hard for practical people to understand the dreamers and for the worldly spirit to believe in an unworldly motive, but it was a dream of ideal conditions on earth and a desire to realize them which had brought the traveler hither. Count Zinzendorf, for that was his name, is one of the finest characters in history. He is both count and saint. It is a rare combination, one not often found among men. Some are born saints and some become so. Cotton Mather in writing of Eliot quaintly says, "We are all of us compounded of those two things, the man and the beast; but so powerful was the man, in this holy person, that it kept the beast ever tyed with a short tedder, and suppressed the irregular calcitrations of it." Wheth- er this is a true description of the godly Eliot or a vivid setting forth of that incubus of original sin which was such an essential of Puritan theology is not certain, but Zinzendorf surely was not greatly 40 A COUNT AND SAINT troubled by these "irregular calcitrations." He was a born saint and manifested a piety which was pre- cocious in the extreme. He was a Joseph with spiritual dreams. His father dying when he was only six weeks old and his mother having married the second time, he was intrusted, while a mere child, to the spiritual care of his grandmother, the Baroness von Gersdorf, one of the best representa- tives of German pietism and a personal friend of Spener. She was a woman of superior mind, read the Bible in its original languages and composed hymns in German and Latin. It is no wonder that an impressionable nature like Zinzendorf's should receive from such a woman the stamp of a perma- nent spirituality. In the old castle of Gross-Hen- nersdorf, Saxony, one is still shown the window, out of which, when a boy, Zinzendorf tossed letters addressed to the Saviour, being sure his Lord would find and read them. Such a child reminds one of what the Scotch mother said, when the minister remarked that her boy was a miracle of divine grace. She was quite indignant and replied, "Na, na, you're all wrong aboot that. Sandy was aye sic a guid lad that divine grace had naething to do for him." At ten years of age Zinzendorf entered the Royal 41 GNADENSEE Paedagogium of Halle, then under the care of the pious Franckc. Here he remained six years and established circles for prayer, although he never allowed his religious activity to interfere with his literary studies. Next he joined the University of Wittenberg. An uncle who had charge of his edu- cation hoped that by withdrawing him from the religious atmosphere of Halle he might be turned toward some worldly position. Tlie young count was matriculated as a student of jurisprudence; civil promotion was sure to follow, but such a course was in the highest degree distasteful. Zin- zendorf longed to devote himself to Biblical stud- ies. He felt, as others so often have, a lack of spir- ituality, a dearth of Christian fellowship in univer- sity life. The Pandects of Justinian were not so interesting as the Mosaic Codes and the Pauline Epistles. Like Wesley, Whitefield and the Ox- ford Methodists he betook himself to prayer and practiced a rigorous self-denial. Over two years having been spent at Witten- berg, like all young men of rank and family he must complete his education by a tour of foreign travel. Nothing is more dangerous to the piety of a young man than transplanting it. Zinzendorf felt this danger and braced himself against it. What 42 A COUNT AND SAINT he wrote down is worthy of being read by all young tourists. "If the object of my being sent to France is to make me a man of the world, I declare that this is money thrown away; for God will, in his goodness, preserve me in the desire to live only for Jesus Christ." Standing in the gallery of paintings at Diisseldorf before a picture of his crucified Lord, on reading the inscription, "Hoc feci pro te, Quid facis pro me?" "This have I done for thee : What doest thou for me?" he was so deeply moved that his future years could not be spent in worldly pursuits. Like one, who, on the road lo Damascus, had seen a vision brighter than the Syrian noon, he was not dis- obedient. On his nineteenth birthday he arrived in Utrecht. Spending a few months in the study of law and medicine he v^'ent to France. His birth and rank, as count, gave him admission into the highest circles of Parisian society. He was much sought after, but he would neither gainble nor dance at court and when Cardinal de Noialles, the arch- bishop of Paris, tried to convert him to the Roman 43 GNADENSEE Catholic faith, the great prelate found it as difficult to change the young man's religion as others had to corrupt his morals. Ignatius Loyola once said to Francis Xavier, "Eternity alone, Francis, is sufficient for such a heart as yours; its kingdom of glory alone is worthy of it. Be ambitious, be magnanimous, but level at the loftiest mark." Nicolaus von Zinzen- dorf leveled at eternity. And now came one of those strange events which is a matter of sequence or Providential in- tent according to our philosophy and interpretation of life. Little bands of Bohemian exiles, driven from their fatherland by persecution, began to ar- rive at Berthelsdorf, in Upper Lusatia, an estate which the count had purchased of his grand- mother. Returning to the estate, while on his wedding journey, the count noticed, one evening, a light in a house which had been built during his absence. Inquiring what it meant he was told it was the house of some refugees from Moravia. He left the carriage, entered and gave them a hearty welcome. It was a turning-point in his life. Tlie count had found another bride. That evening interview had brought together a leader of men and an exiled people waiting for a champion and 44 A COUNT AND SAINT lover. No great movement ever yet was launched without some great man as its formative power. When God would set in motion a far-reaching work he has always had in training some great leader, a Moses, a Paul, a Zinzendorf. In 1737 Count Zinzendorf was ordained as bishop of the Moravian Church. He was not its founder but its resuscitator. He welded together the dis- cordant elements, fused the diverse nationalities. He directed and inspired missionary stations which were multiplying around the world. The burden of the work M^as its inspiration. He lavished his wealth and mortgaged his estates. Worldly hon- ors, the highest offices in the kingdom he sacri- ficed. He touched persons of divergent beliefs and varied nationality. Nobles, university professors, artisans and peasants, were all his friends. "The Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed," a society of young men formed in his student days at Halle, whose insignia was a ring with the motto, "None of us liveth to himself alone," grew under his care into a mighty tree. Count Zinzendorf made mis- takes, he had faults^ of temperament and disposi- tion, but the man who could write concerning one ^ // n' appartient qu'aux grands homntes d'avoir de grands defauts. — La Rochefoucauld. 45 GNADENSEE of his journeys, "All the way to Riga I swam in, peace and joy in the Lord and walked on the shores of the Baltic with a delighted heart," is a saint. In a sermon at Herrnhut Zinzendorf once said, Ich hab' cine Passion, iind die est Er, nur Er. It was his life motto. He rests among the great men of the German race in the Walhalla near Ratisbon, and his epitaph has these fitting words, "He was ordained that he should bring forth fruit, and that his fruit should remain." To go back, in August, 1742, Count Zinzendorf and his daughter, the Countess Benigna, were near- ing Shekomeko, an Indian village in Duchess County, New York. It was the second of the count's Indian journeys. The other members of the party were Anna Nitschmann, Anthony Seif- fert and Conrad Weiser. They arrived at Sheko- meko on the sixteenth and received a warm wel- come from Brother Rauch, the missionary there, who had prepared a bark cottage for their recep- tion. The count declared it was the most agree- able dwelling he had ever inhabited. Here in this forest village the count organized a church of be- lieving Indians. Baptism was administered, regu- lations introduced and a church formed, which was the earliest Moravian church of converted In- 46 Count Zinzendorf A COUNT AND SAINT dians in North America. From this church as a center, rays of light penetrated the forest eastward, and streamed upon Wequadnach and the regions beyond. Count Zinzendorf himself did not come over to Wequadnach or visit Sharon. His visit was all too short even for the few miles that lay between, but the villages were in close touch and the work was one. The missionaries at Wequadnach or Gnadensee were all his personal friends ; with them he had discussed plans of work; and with one of them, David Bruce, he had crossed the ocean. Back of all this movement, as head and soul and purse, was Count Zinzendorf. Where Zinzendorf and Benigna crossed the Hudson is now, on either bank, one of the great Violet growing centers of the United States. From Poughkeepsie to Rhinebeck stretch acres of violet bloom and the air for miles is laden with the fra- grance. There are certain peculiarities of soil and a singularly crystalline atmosphere which make this locality unique in the prodigality and perfec- tion of the violet. It is the region of the old manor lands and the Moravian pilgrimages. As one fol- lows Count Zinzendorf and Benigna on their jour- ney through it he is reminded of the lines in Words- worth's Ode to Duty, 47 GNADENSEE "Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong." 48 THE MISSION AT GNADENSEE "Hear a word that Jesus spake. Eighteen centuries ago. Where the crimson lilies blow Round the blue Tiberian lake. There the bread of life he brake, Through the fields of harvest walking With his lowly comrades, talking Of the secret thoughts that feed Weary hearts in time of need. Art thou hungry? Come and take." — "The Toiling of Felix," Henry van Dyke. THE MISSION AT GNADENSEE In the preceding chapters we have seen how the "dayspring from on high" visited the forest huts of Shekomeko and a church was organized on the arrival of Count Zinzendorf. It was "the church in the wilderness," the center of a new movement. Missionaries from Shekomeko now statedly visited Wequadnach. Mack, Senseman, Pyrlaeus and Post came to these villages at the foot of Indian Moun- tain. Who are these men with foreign names? It startles us to find indefatigable and intrepid souls from Germany pentrating the towns of New Eng- land, touring beyond this little mission at the foot of the mountain to visit the Indian settlements along the Housatonic. They go to Westenhuc, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Whitak near Salisbury, Pachgatgoch in Kent, and Potatik in Newtown. Their example is a silent rebuke to the English. Who are they? Some are from the hum- Si GNADENSEE bier classes, German peasants and artisans, but one of them, Pyrlaeus, was a graduate of Leip- zig and all were on fire with holy zeal. Their work at Wequadnach was not without results. The first convert to receive baptism was Kaupaas named Timothy by the Brethren. Like Epasnetus whom Paul calls the firstfruits of Achaia, he was the promise of a coming harvest and was baptized at Shekomeko, August 4th, 1742, The second con- vert was Moses, baptized in December of the same year, but in 1744, on the third of June, the first baptism occurred in Wequadnach itself and Martha, the second wife of Gideon, chief of the Wampa- noags of Kent, was the recipient. The mission was successfully launched. No one is able to tell just where the original house of worship was built. It was on the west shore somewhere and the Brethren gave it the same beautiful name which they had bestowed upon the lake. It was not a very durable structure. Quite a little congregation seems now to have been gathered at Gnadensee, but in 1744 per- secution broke out which greatly interfered with the mission. It was the time of the French and Indian War. The Brethren were accused of being secret allies of the French, Papists in disguise The absurdity of the charge is seen when one re- 52 THE MISSION AT GNADENSEE members that the bitterest trouble of the Mora- vians had always been their persecution by the Pa- pists. The account given in the second chapter of this book is one of the agreements of church his- torians and the sufficient refutation of such a charge. Yet it was made and persistently repeated. It was said that the missionaries intended to fur- nish firearms to the Indians with which they would fight against the English. The falsehood was widely spread and the whole region filled with ter- ror. In the archivjes of the Brethren's Church at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the author found a let- ter written by Gottlieb Biittner, missionary of the Brethren at Shekomeko, addressed to the Rev. Peter Pratt of Sharon, in which he assures him that the Indians are peaceable and meditate no hostility. It seems that the inhabitants of Sharon were so frightened that they had begun to arm. As a result of the persecution the missionaries were summoned to Poughkeepsie and required to take an oath; military service was demanded of them, both of which acts, be it remembered, were a violation of their religious principles. Measures were now passed by the Assembly of New York which were as unjust and cruel as the decrees of the famous Star Chamber, to escape which our 53 GNADENSEE fathers fled from Old England. One act required all suspicious persons to take the oath of allegi- ance. Another enjoined Moravians and vagrant teachers among the Indians to desist from further teaching or preaching and to leave the Province. The sherifif of Duchess County, assisted by three justices of the peace, closed the mission chapel at Shekomeko. Here in Connecticut the missionaries were summoned before the governor, though, be it said, they were honorably acquitted on examina- tion. But there was a different spirit in New York and it was so evident that the Colonial Assembly of that province aimed to destroy entirely the work of the Brethren among the Indians that Bishop Spangenberg had the missionaries all recalled to Bethlehem. As one goes over this controversy it is evident that it was not all a scare. Greed of land was at the bottom of this satanic work, and Demetrius raised again that old cry that his business was in danger. Converted Indians would not buy the white man's fire-water. The mission at Gnadensee naturally suffered in consequence of this persecution. Some of the In- dians w^nt to Bethlehem. Those who remained were as sheep having no shepherd. The Brethren 54 THE MISSION AT GNADENSEE continued to send native assistants but the mission perceptibly lan^ished and it is no wonder that some of the converts went back to their old vices. In 1749 the Parliament of Great Britain put an end to this unscrupulous legislation. George II was more enlightened than the Provincials in some things and we give him credit for it. By a special act of Parliament the United Brethren were now encouraged to settle in his majesty's colonies without taking an oath ; neither were they required to perform military service. Justice and vindica- tion had come at last. That the reader may see for himself the narrow- ness, injustice and vindictive animus of this Pro- vincial legislation the obnoxious act is here sub- mitted. "An Act for Securing of His Majestie's Government of New York. "Whereas, an Invasion hath been lately attempted against his Majestie's kingdom and government in favor of a pop- ish Pretender ; "Be it enacted — that it shall be lawful for any of the Judges of the Court of Common Pleas with any two Jus- tices of the Peace, to summon any person, whom they shall suspect to be disaffected to the government, to appear be- fore them to take the oath of Allegiance." The Society of Friends were excepted; an affir- mation that they were the faithful subjects of King George and detested the doctrines of the Pope was 55 GNADENSEE received instead of an oath ; but in reference to the Moravians we read : "And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid; that no Vagrant Preacher, Moravian or Disguised Papist should preach or teach either in public or private without first taking the Oaths appointed by this Act, and obtaining a License from the Governor or Commander-in-Chief for the time being, and every Vagrant Preacher, Moravian or Disguised Papist, that shall preach vvrithout taking such Oaths, or obtaining such License as aforesaid shall forfeit the sum of £40 with six months' Imprisonment without Bail or Mainprize, and for the second offence shall be obliged to leave the Colony, and if they do not leave this Colony or shall return, they shall suffer such punishment as shall be inflicted by the Justices of the Supreme Court, not extending to Life and Limb. "And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, that no person or persons whatsoever shall take upon them to reside among the Indians under the pretense of bring- ing them over to the Christian Faith, but such as shall be duly authorized so to do by License from the Governor or Commander-in-Chief for the time being, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Council, and every Vagrant Preacher, Moravian, Disguised Papist or any other person presuming to reside among and teach the Indians without such License as aforesaid, shall be taken up and treated as a person taking upon him to seduce the Indians from his Majestie's Interest and shall suffer such punishment as shall be inflicted by the Justices of the Supreme Court, not extending to Life and Limb. "Provided always and be it enacted by the Authority aforesaid, that nothing in this Act contained shall be con- strued to oblige the Ministers of the Dutch and French protestant reformed Churches, the Presbyterian Ministers, Ministers of the Kirk of Scotland, the Lutherans, the Con- gregational Ministers, the Quakers and the Anabaptists to obtain Certificates for their several places of public wor- ship already erected or that shall be hereafter erected within this Colony, anything in this Act to the Contrary notwithstanding. "This Act to be and remain of force from the publica- tion hereof for the term of one year and no longer." 56 A BARON AND COUNTESS AT THE LAKE "Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere, From yon blue heavens above us bent The gardener Adam and his wife Smile at the claims of long descent. Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'T is only noble to be good, Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood." — "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," Tennyson. A BARON AND COUNTESS AT THE LAKE Although the mission at Gnadensee had lan- guished it had not died. Some of the Indians re- mained and a considerable colony came over from Shekomeko and joined them after the breaking up of the village there. The missionaries at Bethle- hem ever cast longing eyes toward this gem of the forest, these "brown hearts" as Spangenberg called them. In December 1748 John de Watteville and bis wife came in search of these sheep in the wil- derness. They were accompanied by Bishop Cam- merhof and Nathaniel Seidel. It was a delegation to inspect and revive the work. We cannot afiford to pass these people by with ignorant disdain or look at them through the squint of colonial prej- udice. Gnadensee has an illustrious pedigree.- John de Watteville was the son of a Lutheran pas- tor and a graduate of Jena. His original name was John Michael Langguth. Adopted by Frederick de 59 GNADENSEE Watteville, whose only child had died, by letters patent he was created a Baron of the German em- pire and took the name of his adopted father. As a young man he had also been the private secretary of Count Zinzendorf. As so often happens in this world the ruling passion developed a strong affinity between a great man's confidential clerk and his own beautiful daughter. It was inevitable that John de Watteville, Baron, and Count Zinzendorf's eldest daughter, the Countess Benigna, should fall in love, get married, and as they were both Chris- tians and interested in the same work it was natu- ral that they should visit a little lake in the forest which Benigna had almost reached when she came as a young girl with her father six years before. The Countess Benigna is therefore The Lady of the Lake^ and John de Watteville, who later was consecrated as Bishop and became one of the lead- ers in the Moravian Church, is the Baron of Gna- densee. Bishop Cammerhof was an alumnus of the University of Jena. His is a name renowned in * The author does not recommend that the tourist ask too many questions about the Countess of Gnadensee. He may be told that the Selectmen take such people as he to Middletown, but despite the density of local ignorance and a native, inborn prejudice against all titles of nobility, it remains true that Count Zinzendorf's daughter came here. Before Scott created his heroine of Loch Katrine, Benigna was The Lady of the Lake, the Countess of Gnadensee. 60 A BARON AND COUNTESS AT THE LAKE Moravian annals. He was a learned man, well ac- quainted with the church fathers and the history of philosophy. Nathaniel Seidel, the other member of the party, was a man of wide experience in church afifairs. In- timately associated with Bishops Spangenberg and Cammerhof, he later became a bishop himself. He journeyed on foot from Massachusetts to Maryland and preached the gospel to all sorts and condi- tions of men. His wife had been in intimate as- sociation with Count Zinzendorf and his coadju- tors. Surely this little delegation which had come to revive the work at Gnadensee were very consid- erable people. There was, there could be, no better society in the Colonies — and where in the world can we find it now? university graduates, bishops, no- bles, women of birth and quality, all moved by one great love for human souls — souls not the most at- tractive but the most needy. The old motto, No- blesse oblige, had found its interpretation. It could not fail that this visit should bear fruit. With great zeal the Brethren took up the work. They counselled, they exhorted, they comforted, they entreated. Those who had lapsed were won back ; new converts came forth and were baptized. The mission was revived but it needed some one on 6i GNADENSEE the field permanently. Watteville and his friends returned to Bethlehem and reported. A synod of the Church was held, at which it was determined to reorganize the mission and David Bruce was com- missioned to undertake the work. 62 A WEQUADNACH LETTER "The epistolary form, says Bengel, is a preeminence of the Scriptures of the New Testament as compared with those of the Old. . . .The Prophets delivered oracles to the people, but the Apostles wrote letters to the brethren. ... It is in its nature a more familiar communication, as between those who are, or should be, equals. . . . The form adopted in the New Testament combines the advan- tages of the treatise and the conversation. The letter may treat important subjects with accuracy and fulness, but it will do so in immediate connection with actual life. It is written to meet an occasion. It is addressed to particular states of mind. It breathes of the heart of the writer." — "The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament," Bernard. A WEQUADNACH LETTER "WecTiquadnach, February lo, 1749. "We, Abraham, Moses and Jacob, and all the brethren and sisters, salute the whole Church, and are very glad and thankful that the Church has cared for us again, vis- ited us, forgiven us all that has hitherto passed and sent somebody to instruct and teach us. For we know that through this forgiveness many of us have been helped to rights, and set upon our feet again. Therefore, we are glad, and salute the brethren and sisters at Bethlehem; therefore we brethren and sisters pray that our Saviour may wash us in his blood, and make us obedient from the bottom of our hearts; for we thought we should never more, in all our lives, have any one from the Brethren's church among us. We therefore desire our brethren and sisters at Bethlehem to pray for us. We will also pray to our Saviour with our whole hearts, and do our utmost to remain steadfast in the faith in his meritorious death. "Joshua's grandmother salutes him heartily, and is very glad that his sister was baptized at Bethlehem. And I am very glad that the missionaries show us the plain and straight way to our Saviour; and I salute Brother Joseph and mother Spangenberg; and we brethren and sisters wish that where the Brethren live we may live also; for, so long as we had no teachers, we could not say that we loved the Brethren ; but now we feel that we love them. Sarah sa- lutes Brother Joseph and Mother Spangenberg, Brother Cammerhofif and Sister Cammerhofif, and all the brethren and sisters at Bethlehem, Gnadenhuetten, Nazareth, and in all the churches. Our Sister Rachel does the like; our Sis- ter Abigail the like; Bartholomews mother the like; our Sister Miriam the like; our Sister Esther the like; "Brother Jephthah salutes the Brethren Joseph, Cammer- 65 GNADENSEE hof, John, Nathaniel, Father Nitschmann, and the whole church, and recommends himself to their prayers, for he is poor in body and soul. "And we, the rest of the brethren, are indeed poor, and cannot say much ; yet we will constantly tell Brother Bruce the state of our hearts; then our brethren and sisters at Bethlehem will know how we stand to Jesus. "Jephthah salutes also Philippus and all his children. Brother Moses salutes Brother Joseph and wife. Brother Cammerhof and wife, Brother John and wife, and Na- thaniel, and kisses them heartily, and the whole church at Bethlehem and Gnadenhuetten. "I salute my son Jonathan, and pray that he may see this letter, that he may know what we have made out. Sarah salutes Jonathan and Anna; and we shall be glad if he comes back again; and Sarah is very glad that Jonathan again stands on a good ground. "Moses salutes Jonathan, and rejoices much over him, and says : The words of our Saviour shall always be a light to us. "And we salute the brethren and sisters from the Dela- ware nation, and were very glad to hear of the grace our Saviour has bestowed upon them ; and we say to them : Let us dwell together at the pierced feet of Jesus ; let us abide there; and although we have never seen one another with our eyes, we shall nevertheless feel that we are one ; and, when the Lord comes, then shall we see and meet one another. "Esther salutes Jonathan and Anna, and all the sisters, and is sorry that she could not go with them, for her mother hindered her. But she hopes a time may come when she can visit them. Brother Jephthah's daughter, who is sick, salutes her sister in Gnadenhuetten, and thinks she will not live; prays, therefore, heartily to be baptized. "Abraham, Moses and Jacob." Tliis letter quoted here rightly follows the visit of the Bethlehem delegation. Written by Indian converts it expresses their joy on the arrival of Bruce and has the charm and naivete of apostol- ic Christianity. Addressed to the leaders of the 66 A WEQUADNACH LETTER Moravian Church in Pennsylvania, it is a list of salutations and names, poor Indian names ! They glint across our vision like meteors in the midnight sky, appear for a moment and then vanish forever; yet it is a roll more glorious than the blazoned records of heraldry, Heckewelder's Catalogue of Baptisms has supplied a few scanty facts about these believers at Wechquadnach. Some wandered to the Moravian settlements in Pennsylvania; one was buried in the potter's field at Philadelphia. Others have the short and simple annals of the poor. They left this letter, which, like the lake they loved, is a gem in the literature of the Christian Church ; then sank from sight like a stone falling into the water. It refutes forever that brutal calum- ny of a certain American general who said that the only good Indian is a dead Indian. It is the new apologetic we need, a sample of those evidences which warm the heart and keep faith alive ; for if divine grace can soften and make loving that fero- cious Indian nature which caused the early mothers of New England to clasp their children in dread as the warwhoop of the savage rose on the startled air, then there are no limits to its power. The letter is a most interesting study in mis- 67 GNADENSEE sions and spiritual therapeutics and shows the far- reaching influence of the apostle Paul. We can read in the Revision now, I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the Mohicans. In form it is the six- teenth chapter of Romans. The saints at Gnaden- see salute us. Is it too much to say that without this letter the history of the Christian Church would be unwritten and its literature incomplete? If the claim be extravagant certainly the Lake of Grace has a right to its unique and beautiful name. 68 THE HEART OF BRUCE "Therefore, come what may, hold fast to love. Though men should rend your heart, let them not embitter or harden it. We win by tenderness, we conquer by forgive- ness. O strive to enter into something of that large celes- tial charity which is meek, enduring, unretaliating, and which even the overbearing world cannot withstand for- ever ! Learn the new commandment of the Son of God, not to love merely, but to love as he loved. Go forth in this spirit to your life duties; go forth, children of the cross, to carry everything before you, and win victories for God by the conquering power of a love like his." — Frederick W. Robertson. THE HEART OF BRUCE The coming of Bruce was in order that the new life in the resurrected mission might be a perma- nent growth. He was accompanied by Frederick Post. Post was to assist in the reorganization but Bruce was to remain as resident missionary and Hve in the house on the lake. On the 3rd of Feb- ruary, 1749, these two men set out "recommended by the brethren" like Paul and Silas of old. Post returned to Bethlehem on the 28th of February and said he had found the Indians glad to receive their new teacher and anxious to hear from him the words of life. As the mission at Gnadensee claims Bruce as its patron saint, his death in the midst of successful labor being a tender and holy memory that lingers around the lake, it is proper here to give a brief sketch of his life. David Bruce was born in Edinburgh. Scotland. The year of his birth is unknown ; parish regis- 71 GNADENSEE ters have been searched in vain for this date. He was originally a Scotch Presbyterian, but for some reason was led to choose the milder creed and gentler ways of the Moravians. He came to this country in 1741, and as he crossed the ocean with Count Zinzendorf there is a direct and close con- nection between the mission at Gnadensee and that great soul. For seven years and a half Bruce was a travelling evangelist. Although an enrolled member of the first Brethren's church in America he was not content to be in the "Home Congre- gation," but belonged to a class of young men called "The Pilgrims." They were itinerants and summons-men. Bethlehem had its Friedenshiitten (Tents of Peace), but they were no place for Bruce whose soul was "pregnant with celestial fire," whose eyes were ever on the regions beyond. Bruce chose for his wife a daughter of Stephen Benezet of Philadelphia. She belonged to an ex- cellent and famous Huguenot family and a few months after her marriage accompanied her hus- band and Count Zinzendorf on his first visit to the Indian country. Returning to Bethlehem, an old record informs us that Bruce labored as a carpenter in the neces- sities of the new settlement. According to the 72 THE HEART OF BRUCE simple faith of the Brethren, to preach or work with the hands was equally for the glory of God. Next, in 1743, we find him in Philadelphia. The Brethren had established a church there. It was the headquarters for several evangelists and their families. Bruce preached the gospel at different places in the city, then seems to have removed to Bethlehem, whence he itinerated to the Indians of Eastern Pennsylvania. The return of Bishop de Watteville from We- quadnach now brought that call which opened up a field of rare promise here at the foot of Indian Mountain. Bruce began his labors at Wequadnach with great zeal and success. After a few weeks Bishop Cammerhof arrived from Bethlehem to baptize the Indian converts, who greatly desired the Christian ordinances. Cammerhof in his jour- nal says : "We first came to Abraham's hut. Sarah, Abraham's wife, had spied us from afar, through a crevice in the hut, and hurried out to meet us, full of joy, receiving us right warmly, with many tears of love. Very soon came John, who had lately visited Bethlehem, Miriam, Abigail, Jeph- thah, Jacob, and several others, also of the unbap- tized and all rejoiced exceedingly to see us. John ran directly to call Brother Bruce, who was in the n GNADENSEE house on Gnadensee ; and, on his coming to us, Brother Bruce rejoiced more than all, not hav- ing expected us so soon." No less than twenty new converts were bap- tized, and just before the bishop and his assistant left, the celebration of the Lord's Supper took place in the mission house on the shore. The Lake of Grace was now the Lake of the Holy Sacrament, only that is a Catholic designation which a Mora- vian would never use. There was a deep work of grace here in the souls of these Indian Brethren, with promise of other and richer harvests. Bruce labored on with his flock, his feet on earth, his soul in heaven, until the 6th of July, when he fell ill and after three days of suffering passed away. In January, 1749, he began his work; in July he had finished it. He died among his converts. The diary of the Bethlehem congregation gives the fol- lowing information concerning his departure. "July 13th. Toward evening the two Indian brethren, Samuel and Gottlob, arrived from Pach- gatgoch with the intelligence that Br. Bruce had been lying seriously indisposed in the mission house at Wechquadnach already for a week. It was deemed advisable to have a brother visit him, and accordingly Br. Post was despatched without delay. 74 THE HEART OF BRUCE "July 22d. At noon Moses's son came from Wechquadnach with letters from Br. Post, stating that on his arrival Br. Bruce was no more, having departed on the 9th inst., a short time after Samuel and Gottlob had left for Bethlehem. On the 6th inst., after his return from Westenhuc, or Wanna- quatiksk, writes Br. Post, our brother was taken ill, and although he suflfered much pain, was in a happy frame of mind. Shortly before his release, a neighbor called to see him, and on asking him how he did, Bruce replied, 'Not well !' 'But you are prepared to go into the heavenly fatherland,' added the other. 'Yes!' he answered, 'I shall soon see my Saviour.' Our Indian brethren, Moses and Joshua, were his constant attendants during his ill- ness. A short time before his end, taking their hands into his own, he pressed them to his heart, and entreated them to hold fast to the Saviour. Some English neighbors assisted our Indians in making preparations for interring his remains. The former, to whom he had endeared himself, procured linen, and the body was laid out in white. The funeral service was attended by many friends. Joshua, son of Gideon of Pachgatgoch, delivered a discourse in Indian, reminding his hearers of all that their teacher had told them of the Saviour's 75 GNADENSEE love, and many were the tears that moistened the dark cheeks of that mourning and bereft assembly. The body was then put on two canoes, and carried over 'Gnaden See,' the brethren and friends taking their way along the bank to the place of burial, amidst the singing of hymn tunes. At the grave Br. Gideon offered a prayer, and thus was buried the first of our number among the hills and valleys of New England." So ends the beautiful story. If Tennyson in the Idylls of the King touches our heart by the story of Elaine "the lily maid of Astolat," whose pure love consumed her soul to death, and our eyes have a mist of tears as we read of how "the dead Oar'd by the dumb, went upward with the flood," is there not the meed of human tears for a story that is true, as these dark children of the forest robe the teacher whom they loved, not "in white samite, mystic, wonderful," but in the best their poverty could find, and laying him tenderly in their canoes rowed him over the Lake of Grace to their burial ground upon its shore? As the Indian Brother stood there and offered his prayer broken by sobs, can we doubt that the angels bent low to listen or that He whose death is the story of an in- 76 THE HEART OF BRUCE finite grace did not move to greet a kindred spirit as it rose from the shining levels of Gnadensee? What is the highest attainable, the utmost man can do : climb the Matterhorn, find a farther North than Nansen, hold Spion Kop? Rather is it dying like Xavier on the pestilential beach of China, worn out with labors and vigils, the fever in his blood, but the light of a coming glory kindling in his eye ; rather is it dying as this man did here on the shore of Gnadensee, with no hope or thought of mention, without wife or child to cheer him, dying among his Indian converts and with the peace of God transfiguring his face. It is re- lated of Robert Bruce, the hero and deliverer of Scotland, that, after his death, his heart was car- ried by one of his trusty soldiers in a leathern case. In battle this was always flung into the ranks of the foe, whereupon the gallant Scots rushed forward to its rescue, shouting, "On! on, thou heart of Bruce, where'er thou goest we will follow thee." In Melrose Abbey they still show the stone be- neath which 't is said that heart is buried. As we read of this other Bruce, a soldier in a nobler cause, shall we not catch the zeal and in the deepening battle peal the cry. "On ! on, thou heart of Bruce, where'er thou goest we will follow thee"? 77 GNADENSEE The following extract from Loskiel's History of the Mission of the United Brethren among the In- dians in North America, is a fitting monograph with which to close this chapter: "Brother David Bruce was now appointed to the care of the Christian Indians at Schaticook and Wequadnock, who, since the forementioned visit of the bishop, had formed a regular settlement. He resided chiefly in a house at We- quagnock, belonging to the brethren called Gnadensee (Lake of Grace), but sometimes resided at Schaticook, whence he paid visits to Westenhunk by invitation of the chief of the Mohikan Nation, sowing the seeds of the gos- pel wherever he came, but as he was not ordained, Bishop Camerhoff, with brother Beyold went again to Wequad- nock to strengthen the brethren and to administer the sac- raments there. Twenty Indians were added to the church by baptism. Brother Bruce remained in this station till his happy departure out of time, which, to the great grief of the Indian congregation, took place this year. He was remarkably cheerful during his illness, and his conversa- tion edified all who saw him. Perceiving that his end ap- proached, he called the Indian brethren present to his bed- side, and pressing their hands to his breast, besought them fervently to remain faithful unto the end, and immediately fell asleep in the Lord. His funeral was committed to one of the assistants, who delivered a powerful discourse upon the solemn occasion to the company present, among whom were many white people, who had often heard our late brother's testimony of the truth, with blessing." 78 APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION "The Church of Christ, that he hath hallowed here To be his house, is scattered far and near, In North and South, and East and West abroad; And yet in earth and heaven, through Christ her Lord, The Church is one. One member knoweth not another here, And yet tbeir fellowship is true and near; One is their Saviour, and their Father one ; One Spirit rules them, and among them none Lives to himself." — Spangenberg. APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION The death of Bruce was a great loss but it re- sulted in a widening of the sphere and influence of the work. A request now came from the whites that a brother might be sent to preach them the gospel also. In May, 1752, a letter was sent to Bethlehem reiterating the request, in consequence of which Brother Abraham Reinke was sent out in July of the next year on a tour of visitation. In a sojourn of eight weeks he preached twenty times to large audiences. His appointments were at Sal- isbury and Sharon, Connecticut, in the "Oblong," "Nine Partners" and at Livingston's Manor in Duchess County, New York. There is a letter in the archives of the Bethlehem Church signed by thirty-four of the settlers around the Lake of Grace in which they request that Mr. Reinke be sent again to settle among them, or if that may not be, that some one else from the United Brethren 81 GNADENSEE may come, whom they will support as their minis- ter. The field as an Indian mission distinctively was abandoned in 1753, but it was cultivated as a home mission field much longer. Other brethren succeeded Rcinke, one of the last of whom was Joseph Powell. As he shares with Bruce the honor of the work in this region a brief biography is sub- mitted. Joseph Powell was not a missionary to the In- dians but had done the work of an itinerant evan- gelist for thirty-two years in different parts of the country ; had even gone to the West Indies. He was born in Shropshire, England, in 1710. As a young man he became acquainted with the United Brethren through Wesley and Whitefield. His wife, Mary Pritchard, although quite worldly in her early years, was converted while attending a love feast of the Brethren at Oxford. She proved herself later to be just the person for the wife of an evangelist. Tliey sailed from England on March 19th, 1742, with that body of immigrants known in Moravian history as "The First Sea Con- gregation." They reached Philadelphia on June 7th and after a few weeks' stay went to Bethlehem. Of Powell's subsequent history it may be said that he led the life of an evangelist even more fully 82 APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION than Bruce; his travels were more extended and he was an ordained minister. He labored in east- ern Pennsylvania, on Staten Island, at Dansbury near the Delaware Water Gap, on Carroll's Manor in Maryland and at various stations in New Eng- land. Six years of his life were spent in Jamaica preaching the gospel to negro slaves. His wife, who was his constant companion in all these jour- neys, died in Bethlehem, May 6, 1774. Powell was now in his sixty-third year and bowed low by this terrible sorrow, but he felt it better to die working than to die from grief. His spirit longed for service. He whose life had been a rov- ing mission set out for the "Bruce-place," which he longed to see. On arrival he rapidly gained the love of the people; a church was formed in what is now North East Center. His work gave promise of rich and mellow fruitage, but he was only permitted to labor for four months and then was called to join the beloved wife awaiting him above. Literally he had obeyed his Master's voice, had gone "over moun- tain and plain and sea." His last days saw the sun- set gild the dark crowns of Indian Mountain and kiss with gentle radiance the lake at its foot. He died peacefully. The lonely wanderer had found 83 GNADENSEE the "Bruce-place" at last, but it was not the one upon the shore of Gnadensee. Alike in spirit and aim, in the brevity and saint- liness of their ministry here, buried on opposite sides of the lake they loved, with names carved on the same monument, let the arbutus of the Litch- field Hills and the violets of Duchess County keep their memory fragrant. Sometimes we despair for our fellow men. Tlie low-lying clouds of greed settle down over human life; the atmosphere is worldly; we cannot see in the gathering gloom and our ideals are lost. We are like Matthew Arnold standing on the cliffs of Dover and mourning that the sea of faith is at its ebb and draws with melancholy roar down the naked shingles of the world. It is then that we need to recall the names graven on a monument that stands alone out in a field by the Lake of Grace and look up for their symbols in the sky. Joseph Powell ministered to a congregation of Puritan Dissenters and Independents. The Mora- vian Church adheres to the episcopate which it re- ceived from the Waldenses, goes back to Metho- dius and Cyril, valuing highly its apostolic suc- cession, but it is a union church working with all those who would accomplish the high priestly 84 APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION prayer of our Lord and who by their fruits bear witness to the spirituaHty of their Hves. It is idle to dwell on mere titular rights. The grace of God is not a monopoly, not an antiquated claim but an experience and a life. There is an imposition of irresistible hands.' External authority, methods of administration, although they may bind, cannot destroy the liberty of the Spirit. As the tide fills every creek and inlet at its flood, covers with its sapphire waters the hideous mud and garbage of the harbor, so the great ocean of love obliterates our petty barriers and distinctions. They whose lives and sacrifices have been the costliest offering man can bring, are the true Church of Christ on earth and in line with "the glorious company of the apostles." In Mr. Newton Reed's Early History of Amenia there is this statement: "After the dispersion of the Indians, one of the Mo- ravian missionaries — Rev. Joseph Powell — ministered to a Congregation of the early settlers at the station in Amenia, near Indian Pond, where he died in 1774. He was buried there with some of his people, on the field of his labors, in the burying ground of the brethren, near their house of ^ Tactual succession as a theory of the validity of holy orders is sometimes repulsive even when it can be made out. In the Armenian Church the ecclesiastics still use the mummied hand of their great saint, Gregory the Il- luminator, in the consecration of their chief Bishop. 85 GNADENSEE worship. . . . This ground, consecrated by missionary work and Christian burial, is on the farm' of Col. Hiram Clark, in the present town of Northeast, not far east of his house and on the west side of Indian Pond." It should be added that the only indication at present that there was ever a burial place here is the presence of some mutilated stones built into or lying upon a wall near the orchard, * The local antiquarian will find it of interest to make a visit to the Hiram Clark farm. Just across the highway in an apple orchard is the site of the Moravian cemetery. The grave of Powell is here, though the slate stone has been removed and is now in the keeping of the Moravian Historical Society. The mission house or church stood near by. By all means the visitor should walk down to the lake. Not only is the view an attraction but a cove of lilies looks across the water to the southeast. It was from this spot or very near it that the body of Bruce was rowed across in Indian canoes to the place of burial. 86 THE MONUMENT "For of illustrious men the whole earth is the sepulcher; and not only does the inscription upon columns in their own land point it out, but in that also which is not their own there dwells with every one an unwritten memorial of the heart, rather than of a material monument." — Thu- cydides. THE MONUMENT "Our Br. Bruce was much beloved by both whites and Indians, who deplore his early loss. The former desire a brother to preach them the Gos- pel, and have permitted me to put a stone on Br. David's grave, and then inclose it with a fence." So wrote Brother Christian Froehlich in 1752. That stone on "Br. David's grave" has had a strange history. Human thoughtlessness has been more unkind than the elements. The grave, long neglected, wasd ploughed with the rest of the field, and the mutilated and defaced stone built into a wall until at last a farmer took it away and kept it in his house. Here is what was found. Br nburgh in d, minister of the ethrens' Church g the Indians parted 1749. Loskiel, in his History, has restored the inscrip- tion. 89 GNADENSEE "David Bruce from Edinburgh in Scotland a minister of the Brethren's Church among the Indians, departed 1749." Powell's grave fared somewhat better. The stone was removed by a Mr. Clarke to insure its preservation and set into a neighboring wall. For nearly a hundred years the graves of these two missionaries were uncared for and almost passed from human recollection. The world is ruthless with our tender associa- tions. It is a great, engulfing sea to drown our sentiment and romance. It overwhelms them like Pharaoh's chariots and horsemen. Even now with all our schools and culture and Colonial organiza- tions it is only the thoughtful few who feel the touch of the past and hand down its great inspira- tions. A Moravian on Broadway would be stared at and arrested by the police. They would not like his garb or his morals. The eyes of our mighty growing country are set on the future, not the past, yet we need the past to steer by more than we know. That fence around "Br. David's" grave has long since disappeared, become a wood-pile, old iron, ashes — who knows what? Of the mission house not one rotten sill remains and no tradition or histor- 90 THE MONUMENT ical society can point out its exact location. All through the glorious summer weather splendid equipages whirl past Gnadensee, clouds of dust roll up, and the elegant people seem to say, "See ! this is our Appian Way." But the liveried coachman does not stop ; there is no stile by the roadside and no well worn path to "Br. David's" grave. The votive wreaths of May are not for him. 'T is the "Sea of the World's Forgetting" and 't will be so with us all. "The tide of life's river is setting, And will not turn again, Toward the sea of the world's forgetting, Where go the lives of men. "Though memory, backward winging. Longs for our childhood's glee, Yet the wind in the cordage singing Still drives us toward the sea. "Shall we waste the hours in sighing For the sources far away, When the ocean surf is crying And the moments will not stay? "Alas, for our vain regretting! Why should we dread the deep? For the sea of the world's forgetting Is the peace that God doth keep." For nearly a hundred years, as we have said, this "Sea of the World's Forgetting" rolled over these men, their names and the place of their labor, until 91 GNADENSEE the Moravian Historical Society determined that they should have a memorial and a monument. A committee was appointed to take the matter in charge. Permission was obtained from the owner of the land lo erect a monument. Orders were placed and two marble obelisks designed, one for Shekomeko and the other for Wequadnach. The Wequadnach monument was set up a short time be- fore its dedication, the remains of Bruce having been exhumed and placed beneath it. The bones and skeleton were found to be in an almost per- fectly sound condition, not recumbent as with us but in a sitting posture according to the Indian mode of burial. It was not deemed best to remove the remains of Powell but to replace the old tombstone and guard the sanctity of his grave. As the church and mission house had both stood on the west side of Gnadensee it seemed as though the associations of the spot should not be forgotten or obliterated. Accordingly, it was decided to hold a service at this locality and then proceed across the water in boats to the southeastern shore, as the Indians did when they rowed the body of their beloved Bruce across the lake for burial. A delegation consist- ing of the dignitaries in the Moravian Church with 92 THE MONUMENT choir and trombonists had charge of the services. A day was fixed for the dedication. There are a few Hving witnesses who can still remember it. It is the most important event in the history of the town. Let a Moravian pen describe that scene. It was October 6, 1859: "On the conclusion of the brief ceremony" (the ceremony at the grave of Joseph Powell), "the party set out for the grave of David Bruce, on the east side of Indian Pond in the town of Sharon, Conn. It was deemed unsafe to cross the water in boats. Some of the number followed the footpath along the base of tlie mountain ; others, driv- ing, took the road that leads around the right shore to the outlet, and to the farm house of Mr. Andrew Lake. Here the procession formed as on the previous occasions, and, amid the music of trombones, moved to the Wechquad- nach burial ground, and to the monument that bears the name of those who, a century ago, labored in this vicinity among Indians and whites. "On approaching the meadow in which the ceremonies were to be held, there were indications of a numerous gathering. Along the Sharon road, carriage was seen fol- lowing carriage, and already the lane and orchard near by were full of vehicles. Hundreds of human beings were collected about the monument, and hundreds collected along the ledges and sunny slopes with which the rugged spot is diversified. It was altogether a scene of varied forms, and coloring, and life, that bespoke an extraordi- nary occasion, and has left an indelible impression on the minds of all who witnessed it. The wind blew fresh from the north, whirling the withered leaves from the tree-tops, and roughening the bosom of the lake with white-crested waves ; and so boisterous did it grow, that it was inex- pedient to assemble immediately about the monument. A 93 GNADENSEE southerly slope near by afforded protection from the ele- ments, and here the worshippers gathered to recall the la- bors of the dead, and to meditate on the bliss which is the portion of those who have died in the Lord. Tier on tier of anxious listeners were seated to the very top of the lit- tle amphitheatre, and among these were swarthy faces, a handful of survivors of the doomed race that once was lord of the soil. They were Sharon Indians, who had come to hear what had transpired when their forefathers dwelt along the borders of Indian Pond. Half-way down the ac- clivity stood the speakers and the trombonists, fronting the rest of the seventeen hundred spectators, who, standing be- low in a compact crowd, or seated in wagons, listened with deep attention to the services which had called them to- gether." Bishop Wolle read the Easter Morning Litany. The Rev. Edmund De Schweinitz dehvered a care- fully prepared historical address and the congrega- tion sang from the Moravian Hymnal: "How sweetly these our brethren sleep. Enjoying endless peace; The grave, wherein their Saviour lay, Is now their resting place. "Naught can disturb these heirs of life, All earthly cares are fled. To be with Christ was their desire. And now they're perfected." If it were in keeping with our age for a lake to have a patron saint, Gnadensee should be called St. David's Lake. In the middle ages this grave by its shore would have been a shrine, a lofty cathe- 94 THE MONUMENT dral would tower above it, through whose aisles and arches would swell the anthem, the daily ma- tins and vespers, Moravian faith builds charac- ters, not cathedrals ; it canonizes no saints ; its rows of flat stones with plainest inscriptions attest the democracy of death. As it has made an exception for once, let us at least preserve the monument from vandalism/ The inscription reads as follows: [North Side.] Joseph Powell, A Minister Of The Gospel In The Church Of The United Brethren, Born, 1710, Near Whitechurch, Shropshire, England, Died, Sept. 23, 1774, At Sichem In The Oblong,' Duchess Co., N. Y. " By a recent purchase the southern and eastern shore of the Lake of Grace has become the property of Dr. Wil- liam B. Coley and Mr. George B. Agnew of New York City. This insures the preservation of the natural beauty along the lake front and will protect the Monument from those who would deface it. ' "The Oblong" mentioned on the Monument is that strip of territory fifty miles long and less than two miles wide which was ceded by Connecticut to New York in 1731 in exchange for the "Horseneck" on the Sound or "The Equivalent" as it was called in the land titles of that pe- riod. By this transfer Connecticut gained some good har- bors which were greatly coveted, but lost that western ex- tension by which Massachusetts now overlaps. "The Equivalent" ceded by New York embraced the present towns of Greenwich, Stamford, New Canaan and Darien. 95 GNADENSEE [South Side.] David Bruce, A Minister Of The Gospel In The Church Of The United Brethren, From Edinburgh, Scotland, Died July 9, I749> At The Wechquadnach Mission, Duchess Co., N. Y. [East Side.] 'How Beautiful Upon The Mountains Are The Feet Of Him That Bringeth Good Tidings, That Publisheth Peace; That Bringeth Good Tidings Of Good; That Publisheth Salvation." — Isaiah 52 : 7. [West Side.] Erected By The Moravian Historical Society, October 6, 1859. 96 A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM "Nicht Jerusalem Sondern Bethlehem Aus dir kommet, was mir frommet." — Hymn Book of 1735. "The place having as yet no name, it so happened, that on Christmas Eve we called to mind the birth of our Sav- iour, and as there was a thin partition-wall between our dwelling-room and the cow- and horse-stable, the 'Ordi- nary' in the tenth hour of the night went over to the stable and commenced to sing with great fervency of spirit " 'Not Jerusalem — No, from Bethlehem We receive life and salvation.' "And thus on Christmas Eve, 1741, this new settlement received the name of Bethlehem." — John Martin Mack. A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM As the reader has followed the story thus far it is very evident that what has given Gnadensee its unique importance was an influence emanating from Bethlehem. The story of the Mission is pre- served in the archives of the church there, and all the missionaries came from Bethlehem. It was the Antioch of this missionary movement. The colonizers of Pennsylvania were idealists and reformers. First came William Penn, who founded the city of Brotherly Love and caused the Society of Friends to take root in the soil of the New World. Next was the Pantisocracy of the Lake Poets. Attracted by the euphony of the word Susquehanna, Coleridge, Southey and Lov- ell planned to plant on the banks of that river an Eden of equal rule, the haunt of the muses, the home of lovers — a delightful dream soon to be shattered by a prosaic world which insists that L.cfC. 99 GNADENSEE poets, like other people, shall earn their bread and pay their bills. Between Penn's Philadelphia which succeeded and Coleridge's Pantisocracy which failed, came the Missionary Commune of the Moravian, in many respects a copy of that apostolic Christianity which succeeded Pentecost. The home of this New World economy and missionary propaganda was Bethlehem. The de- scendants of the Pilgrim Fathers are so famiUar with the story of the Mayflower and the settlement at Plymouth that they do not sufficiently credit an- other movement equally heroic. Other colonists beside those who came from Old England have moulded our cosmopolitan country. There are sec- tions of Pennsylvania thoroughly American, but neither English nor Puritan ; our new England speech is not the mother tongue, and one cannot understand what is said. There is a German pa- tois, a Moravian lineage. We have seen before how the Moravian move- ment had behind it great leaders, Huss, Comenius, Zinzendorf, and now another appears in David Nitschmann, the "Founder of Bethlehem." Born in 1676, in the valley of Zauchenthal, Austria, at the head of which stands the Moravian city of 100 (3HUH6n. r f _^B_ £ f)ETKl.EHEV1.PA A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM Fulnek, this man whose soul had received the bap- tism of fire, opened his house for meetings of gos- pel fellowship. For this he was sent to jail re- peatedly, condemned as an arch heretic. In 1723, he, a husband and father, found himself in prison with his neighbor, David Schneider. The story of their escape is as marvelous as that of Peter from the gaol in Jerusalem. Nitschmann crossed the mountain border to be joined later by his wife and children. The reunited household met with a warm welcome in the new Moravian colony at Herrnhut. Persecution had only kindled the old-time faith and daring. By direction of th(* Herrnhut colony, Nitschmann accepted a call to take part in the founding of a missionary settle- ment in the Danish West Indies. This was in 173 1. The island of St. Croix was selected. The attempt failed. The heroic wife died by her hus- band's side and was buried in a tropical grove, but Nitschmann did not cease his labors. He returned to Europe and tried unsuccessfully to found a Mo- ravian colony in Holstein. In 1741 he crossed the Atlantic a second time. It was a cold, wintry day, but the dauntless Moravian, sixty-four years old, standing up to his knees in the snow, felled the first tree for the building of Bethlehem. Sixteen years lOI GNADENSEE of quenchless zeal and undaunted toil followed un- til by 1758, the year of his death, the settlement had become the center of missionary operations, not only for the thirteen original colonies, but the West Indies and Surinam in South America. The grand old man had succeeded at last. Ere he died the influence of his life, in ever-widening circles, had touched the little Indian village of Wequad- nach. The colonists of Bethlehem are as interesting as its founder. In June, 1742, there reached the south bank of the Lehigh a ship's company of fifty-six members. They were English and German colo- nists, constituting what is known in Moravian an- nals as "The First Sea Congregation." On land- ing (they had sailed in "The Catharine," from Gravesend, England), they divided themselves into two parts, known as the "Home Church" and the "Pilgrims' Church." Upon the former was laid the work of house-building and social economy, on the latter the work of gospel evangelization. The ros- ter of "The First Sea Congregation" has names of great interest. Among the twenty-one who were ordained to be ministers of the Gospel were Joseph Powell, Jo- achim Senseman, C. Frederick Post and Nathan- 102 A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM iel Seidel, all of whom came to Wequadnach. "The Second Sea Congregation" came over in "The Lit- tle Strength," which sailed from Cowes and dropped anchor off Staten Island, in the latter part of November, 1743. This was of more varied na- tionality. Over one hundred church members were in this ship's company. Church ships brought fully six hundred Moravian colonists in the first twenty years after the founding of Bethlehem. The missionary activity of the Bethlehem econ- omy has been pointed out, but there is a practical side which must not be overlooked. The care and conduct of this Bethlehem settlement is a beautiful example of the possibilities of Christian love and an interesting study in social economics. There were no millionaires and no paupers. All toiled and labored, their motto this: "In commune ora- mus. In commune laboramus, In commune pati- mur. In commune gaudemus." ' The Brethren had grist-mills, sawmills and tan- neries ; they engaged in joinery, glaziery, linen weaving, stocking weaving, rope-making, tailoring, brickmaking, mason and carpenter work. Thus we see how David Bruce was equally at home teaching his Indian converts or toiling with his * Together do we pray, labor, suffer, rejoice. 103 GNADENSEE hands as a carpenter. There were no idle spirits. If Bethlehem was the "school of the prophets", its practical farmers were sent to Nazareth, a village near by. The Brethren called the latter colony the "Patriarchen Plan." It is very interesting in these days when the world of labor is rent with agi- tation and strikes, when the servant-girl question is trying the patience of every housekeeper, to read of one human hive where all were contented, where there were love feasts for the milkers, washers and threshers. Spangenberg composed a hymn which was sung by the spinning sisters. Work now has largely lost its joy and song. May it not be because the end is selfish? The ob- ject of this work in the Bethlehem economy was something other than self-support or mere eco- nomic thrift. Increase was used, not hoarded ; the profits of industry were employed to send light and truth into all the earth. The age of trusts was not yet, but the gospel was a trust divinely sent. So- cially, the single brethren and sisters had their own quarters, but these were not the rigid establish- ments of monks and nuns. Marriage was free to all who chose it. Such was Bethlehem in its spirit and beginnings. It was in the latter part of December, 1901, that 104 A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM a tourist from the Lake of Grace found himself for the first time in Bethlehem. He had come to spy out the land, impelled by the attraction of a watch- night service with trombone accompaniment, in the old Moravian church, and a desire to see the place whose missionaries had given a tender and unique name to a little lake at the foot of Indian Moun- tain. Crossing the flooded Lehigh on a swaying wooden bridge, he saw on a hill above the dome of the old church. That hill is one of the high places of the land where veneration is not idolatry. There is no more impressive spot in America, un- less it be Burial Hill at Plymouth. The square, severely plain church, with gray walls and blue don^e bespoke a German old world line- age — an impression confirmed by the peaked roof, dormer windows, bell tower, stone fa9ades and quaint courts of the adjoining establishments. The first thing to do was to find lodgings. To one in search of the historico-picturesque, the Sun Inn was the place exactly. It was the first house of enter- tainment built by the Moravians. Later it received a license from George III. The office, which is the oldest part of the building, is hung round with pic- tures of early Bethlehem. There is a room where Washington slept, the raths-kellar and an adjoining 105 GNADENSEE cave. Lafayette and Count Pulaski have both been honored guests at the Inn. There was just time before tea for a stroll through the cemetery. The stones lay in rows and were fiat like the Jew- ish graves in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Every- thing was tenderly sacred. In the northwest or abbey corner rest the leaders and founders of the church, buried among their Indian converts. It must be holy to linger here in the summer even- ings. "The long grass rising round the graves Not even its tiny stalklet waves; Nor is a footstep heard : no sound Invades this quiet burial-ground." It is the custom in Moravian villages for a pro- cession with trombones to awaken the inhabitants before daybreak on Easter morning. An early ma- tin service is held in the church, after which they go to the cemetery in season to meet the rising sun. The beautiful Easter Morning Litany is used. The Service closes with the ascription: "Glory be to Him who is the Resurrection and the Life; He was dead and behold He is alive forevermore. And he that believeth in Him, though he were dead, yet shall he live. "Glory be to Him in the church which waiteth for Him, and in that which is around Him; for ever and ever. Amen." 1 06 A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM The deep blasts of the trombones lend grandeur to the service and seem to anticipate the voice of the archangel and the trump of God. Here where so many of the dead are resting this service has been repeated on each successive Easter morning for one hundred and sixty years. It annually draws great numbers of people from the neighboring vil- lages and cities. After a good night's rest in the Sun Inn the his- toric town claimed attention. A low window in a high peaked building behind the church displayed this sign, "Moravian Peppermints and Souvenirs." That window, like the famous one in Thrums, gave a chapter to a book. In a quaint room with- in, half kitchen and half store, equally fragrant with peppermints and holiness, a Moravian sister pre- sided over her household treasures and those tra- ditions of which her personality was the embodi- ment. The corner-stone of this house (the most interesting structure in Bethlehem) was laid Sep- tember 28, 1741. Its "Der Saal" was consecrated by Count Zinzendorf, and used as a chapel. For ten years this building was the only place of wor- ship. Ninety-three Indians were baptized within its walls, some of whom had come from the region around the Lake of Grace. 107 GNADENSEE The old "Bell Haus," originally a seminary for girls, is one of the most picturesque buildings in America. With a chapel and the Sisters' House it forms an enclosure on three sides, so utterly for- eign that one would think himself in Saxony and the eighteenth century. "Colonial Hall," used now as the Seminary, was converted into a military hospital in the Revolu- tion. More than five hundred Revolutionary sol- diers died within its walls. Washington, Gates, Sullivan, Schuyler, Richard Henry Lee, Baron Steu- ben, DeKalb, the brave Count Pulaski and Lafay- ette all came here to visit sick and dying comrades. Back of Colonial Hall was the site of the Indian village known as Fried enshiitt en or Tents of Peace, an asylum for the Sharon Indians. The watch-night service on New Year's Eve was attended in the old church by fifteen hundred people. First came the Memorabilia, which were an outline by the Moravian pastor of the year's history, touching on matters pertaining to the church, the nation and the world — a tender resume. At the stroke of twelve the vast congre- gation rose and with the choir burst into song*. Loud, long and deep was the trombone accompani- ment. It is difficult to tell which is the pleasanter io8 A WINDOW IN BETHLEHEM memory, this grand thrilling service at midnight or a Httle anticipatory meeting with Sister Shultz and her Moravian friends, where the tourist en- joyed her buns and coffee, and Gemuthlichkeii reigned supreme 109 THE HIGHER PATRIOTISM "They inhabit their own country, but as strangers; they bear their part in all things as citizens, and endure all things as aliens. Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland a foreign country. . , . They live in the flesh, but walk not after the flesh. . . . They dwell on earth, but are citizens of heaven. They are poor, and make many rich; they are in want of all things, and they have all things in abundance; they are dishonored, and in dishonor glorified." — Epistle to Diognetus, V. THE HIGHER PATRIOTISM The Moravian has been accused of a want of patriotism, but he began his labors in North Amer- ica in a time of great difificulty and was entirely misunderstood. Most men, being fighting animals, cannot understand one who will not fight. The Moravian did not come here to fight or build up a nation, but to preach a gospel of peace to a savage race from whom the aggressive Anglo-Saxon was striving to wrest the sovereignty of the soil. He stood between the white man and the Indian, an object of twofold suspicion, yet the friend of both. Carried away by their love of freedom, dazzled by their successes and the great hope of acquiring in- dependence, the colonials forgot the claims of the missionary while they magnified those of the pa- triot. The men who fought with the king's sol- diers against the French and Indians, and later with Washington and Lafayette against the king, 113 GNADENSEE could not understand a man who had conscientious scruples against all fighting. There are three types of patriotism which must be kept distinct and never depreciated or con- founded. There is first an intense but non-right- eous type; we hate to call it wicked, although it is unethical. This type indulges in oaths during the excitement of battle. It demands surrender, as Ethan Allen did at Ticonderoga, "in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." Somehow, it always makes the "Continental Con- gress" more important than the "Great Jehovah ;" yet we need this type. The second type is purer and higher, is both a patriotism and a religion, evfcikes feelings which go surging through our nature and keep the world heroic. This type is represented by Nathan Hale, who, condemned to death as a spy, mounted the scaffold, saying, "I regret only that I have but one life to lose for my country." We shall never cease to feel the rapture of that young, heroic soul. There is a third and still higher type represented by these men who came to the Lake of Grace. They could not endure the thought of blood and carnage. Their favorite classic was not Plato's Republic or More's Utopia, but the Sermon on 114 THE HIGHER PATRIOTISM the Mount. They longed for a time to come when the war-drum should throb no longer, when the meek and not the strong should inherit the earth ; yet they were soldiers, too. The Moravian was the minuteman of the Lord's army. The call might come to go to the frozen shores of Green- land, the Ethiopians under the equator, the poor slaves of the West Indies, the leper settlements of South Africa and Jerusalem or the saVage Indians of North America ; it made no difference ; he was ready to go anywhere at a moment's notice. It is related in Bishop Spangenberg's work on Moravian Missions that "Having once made known on a prayer day, at Bethlehem, that five missionaries had died in a very short time in the island of St. Thomas, where the difficulties of our brethren were then very great, no less than eight persons volun- tarily offered, on that very day, to go thither to re- place those who had fallen." When Zinzendorf was at Marienborn, a former Moravian settlement in Germany, he said one day to a certain brother, "Will you go to Greenland to-morrow, as a mis- sionary?" It was the first intimation the man had had of such a thing, but he replied with scarcely a moment's hesitation, "If the shoemaker can finish the boots which I have ordered of him by to-mor- row, I will go." GNADENSEE The Moravian was "The Man Without a Coun- try." He was a cosmopolitan striving to bring in a universal peace on earth. His soul had been fired by those visions which cheered the prophets and dreamers of Israel. He looked for a Sabbafis- mos on earth, when the black-shotted guns should moulder on the parapet, these mov'ing volcanoes of the ocean sink out of sight, when the plowman should till the glebe and the shepherd fold his flock securely. Then should Mars' bloody reign be over; then should "All men's good Be each man's rule, and universal Peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea Thro' all the circle of the golden year." The Indian mission at Gnadensee was abandoned in 1753, a step rendered inevitable by the sale of the Indian lands and the consequent dispersion of the tribe. The mission had three distinct periods, of four years each. Work began in 1741 and ex- tended to 1745. This was for entrance and estab- lishment, to be interrupted and broken up by per- secution and the arm of the civil government. The second period was from 1745 to 1749, a time of lan- guishing and decline, to be crowned, however, by a renewal at its close. The last period was from 116 THE HIGHER PATRIOTISM 1749 to 1753, a period of fruitage and blessing, but also disruption and abandonment — abandonment, and therefore loss, the commercial instinct will say. An age which measures everything by the standard of success can see no value in abandoned missions and has scant praise for missionsl of any kind. It worships supremacy of intellect rather than great- ness of heart, constructs out of life's action and achievement an arch of triumph for the conqueror, but has no praise for the "silent thunder of fidelity." There needs to be a recasting of estimates and values. When a nation's honor must be defended we do not talk of loss, though the prosperity of a generation is mortgaged and the surging human wave leaves behind its bloody wreckage. If the tears and sacrifice of an abandoned mission are only waste, then the story of the broken alabaster box has no meaning. Machinery abandoned to rust and disuse is loss of capital, but the heroism of personality is an unspent force, which always registers gain somewhere. 117 ALONG THE SHARON SHORE "Sharon is a pretty New England village with white frame houses set back from the wide grass-grown streets, almost buried in maples and elms, the favorite shade trees of this country. On making a turn in the road we saw it high above us on a hill-top, the rays of the declining sun lighting up spire and churchyard, the marble tombstones glittering like mounds of driven snow." — Moravians in New York and Connecticut. ALONG THE SHARON SHORE The bass and pickerel will not bite to-day; the boat drifts idly along the Sharon shore. The di- visional between New York and Connecticut runs through the center of the lake, a great convenience to fishermen, who, when threatened for violating the law in one state, always swear they were in the other. Fishermen have low ethics and ideals. Their bump of truthfulness has the defect of Ananias. But we must not be too severe. Christ chose his apostles from among fishermen, one of whom was the founder and organizer of his Church. That fisher's coat which Peter girt about him when he cast himself into the sea, would be a more valuable find than the toga of Marcus Aurelius. The pic- ture of a fish is often found on the rings, gems and utensils of the early Christians ; is the favorite mon- ogram on the tombs in the Catacombs. The Greek 121 GNADENSEE word ichthus is an acrostic for Jesus Christ, Son of God, our Saviour. Christ is called the carpenter's son in the Gospels, but there is an early hymn of the Church, by Clement of Alexandria, addressed to Him as the fisherman : "Fisher of men, the Blest, Out of the world's unrest, Out of sin's troubled sea. Taking us. Lord, to Thee." What were these missionaries at Gnadensee but fishermen? That is all, but that is enough. For some reason the Brethren were very fond of Sharon as a name. One of their missions in Barbadoes was called Sharon and another on the Saramacca in Guiana. Drifting along the Sharon shore! The Sharon of Scripture was the great maritime plain south of Carmel and Esdraelon. It was the highway of the nations. Over it swept the armies of Rameses, Sennacherib, Cambyses, Alexander, Vespasian and Napoleon. Peter dwelt awhile at Sharon, with one Simon, a tanner, whose house was by the seaside. The old road still runs from Jafifa to Jerusalem through groves of pomegranates and oranges. Scarlet tulips and poppies are in the fields. The white narcissus, the rose of Sharon, blooms 122 ALONG THE SHARON SHORE everywhere. Nightingales fill the air with song. The landscape is wrapped in a warm south haze, above which wave those "silent groves of palm" — on the east the blue of the far-ofif hills, on the west the blue of the sea, with its line of yellow sand and broken foam. The boat is opposite the monument now — the mountain and the monument are mirrored in the perfect water. The Lake of Grace is a sea of glass mingled with fire like that which John saw in Pat- mos, a sea where time's surges beat no more, where sorrow's billows never come, but where bright wavelets crest themself on shining sands and rip- ple in the music of their joy forever. The stars will come out to-night, the same which Abraham saw in his wanderings, which attracted the gaze of Chaldean astronomers, which shone when the pyramids were young and which shine on and on, while the generations of men live out their little lives and pass to the dark halls of death. Yes, we grow old in silent years and the grim ferryman, stoled in black, at last rows us over the lake to the burial-ground upon its shore; but an old book says, "they that turn many to righteous- ness shall shine as tlie stars for ever and ever," and the prophet was thinking of David Bruce and Jo- seph Powell. PART II THE FRAME THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE "If one has not leisure for detailed explorations, and can spend but a week, let him begin, say at Sharon or Salis- bury, both in Connecticut, and both accessible from the Harlem railroad. On either side, to the east and to the west, ever-varying mountain-forms frame the horizon. There is a constant succession of hills swelling into moun- tains, and of mountains flowing down into hills. . . . On the west of Salisbury you ascend Mount Riga to Bald Peak, thence to Brace Mountain, thence to the Dome, thence to that grand ravine and its wild water, Bash-Bish — a ride in all of about eighteen miles, and wholly along the mountain-bowl. On the eastern side of this range is Sage's Ravine, which is the antithesis of Bash-Bish. Sage's Ravine, not without grandeur, has its principal attractions in its beauty; Bash-Bish, far from destitute of beauty, is yet most remarkable for grandeur. Both are solitary, rugged, full of rocks, cascades, grand waterfalls, and a savage rudeness tempered to beauty and softness by va- rious and abundant mosses, lichens, flowers and vines. I would willingly make the journey once a month from New York to see either of them." — "Star Papers," Henry Ward Beecher. THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE There are some people whose brains are lined with black. You would think to talk with them that old Burton had them in mind when he wrote his "Anatomy of Melancholy." Instead of hearing the robins sing and seeing Aurora walk the lake with golden sandals, they rise, as Cowper did, "like an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the ooze and mud of melancholy." Such persons should break up this habit of mental vivisection. Burton cured his melancholy by going to the bridge foot and hearing the bargemen swear, which invariably threw him into a fit of laughter. Cow- per wrote "John Gilpin." Johnson, spleeny old hypochondriac, was a London vagrant, haunting publishers with his unbought manuscript, glad to dine on suspicious tripe at a cookshop, under- ground, wiping his hands, after the greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland dog, until at last 129 GNADENSEE he found and made love to a widow, who had chil- dren as old as himself. But there is a better way to cure melancholy for those not afflicted with this disease of genius, and that is to climb every hill and mountain in sight. This assumes that you are a disciple of Roosevelt, love "the strenuous life," that your heart action is sound and that you have the stride of a golfer. It is quite certain now that the ladder of Jacob's dream, whose top reached to heaven, was con- structed out of those mountain ranges which he saw at sunset as he lay there out under the Syrian sky. Rising from the waters of Gnadensee there is a stairway to dream about and over which the an- gels might pass continually. It was the dominat- ing feature in a landscape dear to Moravian eyes, the "Delectable Mountains" rising from his mission by the Lake of Grace. The first stair is Indian Mountain or Poconnuck. So steep is the wall on the western side that it al- most descends into the lake, reminding one of that "prisoners' safe stairway" in the castle of Chillon, where the poor victims walked trustingly ofi the dark steps to fall into the deep water below. From the summit numerous lakes can be seen. This is the Lake Country of Connecticut and can be com- 130 THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE pared with the scenery around Grasmere and Der- wentwater. If one has time, the best way is to walk the entire length of the mountain. Passing from side to side and coming out on the ledges there are beautiful views of Webotuck and Gnadensee. Gna- densee is more in sight. Its waters gleam continu- ally through the trees. Like a smiling face they are ever saying, "Behold me!" Yet it is no self- conscious summons, but rather the attraction of an irresistible charm. It must be confessed, however, that the thick woods, which make the sides of Po- connuck so attractive to the eye, interfere some- what with the view. The ideal mountain for a view is one which has its crown shaven like a monk's, Poconnuck and ptarmigan! The woods on the mountain are full of grouse, or would be if the hunt- ers would leave them alone. There is a frequent whir of wings and one is touched by the boldness and wiles of the mother bird to protect her covey. The grouse on Poconnuck and the ptarmigan of the Arctic lands are the same family, only the lat- ter change their color from the mossy hue of the tundra to the whiteness of the frozen plains. An Alaskan gold hunter wrote a poem on a wounded ptarmigan. What is poetry, after all, but the voice of some experience which will not be mute, a ran- 131 GNADENSEE dom bird song? It was Vogelweid, the minne- singer, who said he learned the art of song from the minstrels of the air, and left the monks his treasures with the request that they should daily feed the birds as they gathered on his tomb. The second stair is Mount Riga, which is reached by taking the road from Ore Hill. Strung along, a few farms have vainly tried to reclaim the moun- tain. Hawks and crows, wheeling overhead, and saucy jays, exult and mock at man' failure. When farmers up here are asked how large the farm is, they say, "Half an acre is land, the rest is creation." There is a little settlement with a schoolhouse, and near the dam, at the outlet of some ponds, are the ruins of an old iron furnace. Mount Riga has had an industrial history. Here was forged a chain, in the war of the Revolution, which the Continentals stretched across the Hudson, in order to impede the British ships. Among the Obstruction Relics preserved at "The Hasbrouck House," Newburgh, N. Y., which was Washington's headquarters dur- ing the latter part of the war, is the link of an old chain taken from the bottom of the Hudson oppo- site Fort Montgomery; also a portion of the boom, obstructing the river at West Point. The iron work was done at Mount Riga. While George the 132 THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE Third and his Tory cabinet were forging the chains of colonial oppression, the furnace men on Mount Riga were forging chains to stop his majesty's ships and terribly humble his pride. The patriot army guarded the passes of the Highlands. Once Sir Henry Clinton's banners waved in victory from the lower forts, but it was only a momentary tri- umph. Burgoyne's surrender compelled his re- treat. From the beginning to the end of the war, the Hudson was a chained river. When the Greeks freed themselves from the Turk- ish yoke, two anchors were cast on Mount Riga for frigates of the Greek government. Musket iron was also made for the United States armories at Harper's Ferry and Springfield. The story of free- dom would not be complete without a Mount Riga chapter. One and a half miles westward is ''Lotus Lodge" or Warner's Camp, romantically situated on North or Riga Lake. Three mountains rise up, one in in New York, one in Connecticut, and one in Mas- sachusetts. It is the Lake of the Three States. The water is so pure and cold that the pickerel, when caught, are transparent. This lake on the top of a mountain is a lens or mirror of prehis- toric time. Its wild beauty abides 133 GNADENSEE "IcTi sah Dich einmal Und ich sehe Dich immer." Below the Mount Riga dam the stream rushes madly down to Salisbury, four miles below. The Indians called the Riga stream WacJiocas- tinook, "falling water." In these woods you can- not get away from the roar of waterfalls. You are listening to the oldest music in the world. "The sound of streams that swift or slow Draw down eonian hills and sow The dust of continents to be." It would seem fitting that such a region should have some thrilling story or legend. One of the oldest inhabitants says a mulatto slave who es- caped by the "Undergroimd Railroad" and came here, fell in love with a beautiful Indian girl, whom he married. One day a traveler came along and with reckless rudeness insulted the young wife. He had focused a burning lens on her bare bosom. Indian nature never forgets or forgives an injury, and soon after the traveler was found by the road- side, stabbed to death. The bride and wife had done it, but her lover was so true and devoted, that to save her he confessed to the crime and died in her stead. It is a thrilling, ghastly story of human passion, a tale of expiation, mingled with weird touches of second sight and spirit phenomena. 134 (4 THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE It is hard, sometimes, to tell where history ends and legend begins. Every legend, like a comet, has a nucleus of reality with a tail of imagination. The legend makers dream and invent ; the critics pursue them to the cities of refuge. Hidden in the woods of Mount Riga is a little pond. Dark spruces grow around it and in a quak- ing bog the sullen waters frown. It is the pool of the murdered traveler; the dark spruces are his glossy hair and the water-soaked bog his bloody garments. Hardly a person comes here in the live- long year. Man and animals shun the place, but sometimes there is a person who wants to test his nerves. Let him visit the sullen pond at the dead of night. Let him prepare for it by reading The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Let him come when the forest is bare and brown, when the wind shrieks and moans through the trees, when it dies away in a gasp and sigh and in that cold stillness between the midnight and the dawn, the mist arises and the ghost of the dead man moves about. Do n't flinch or be speechless now. You wanted to test your nerves. Stand on the quaking bog by the sullen pool and — recite Poe. 135 GNADENSEE "The skies they were ashen and sober The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." 'T is a pity if a man can't see a ghost in the mist, when the inhabitants of Mount! Riga see portents in the sky and the judgments of the day of doom before they arrive. There are blood-curdhng screams around the haunted pool. They sound hke the cries of one in pain, whose Hmbs the fiends are rending or whom some one is stabbing to death. Whoever has heard those screams will not go to the haunted pool at midnight and recite Poe, but stay at home and eat celery. The screams might be those of a murdered traveler, but there are wildcats on the mountain. The road from Mount Riga leads to a sign where a walk of a few minutes brings the tourist out on Bald Peak. Instantly, there is an unveiling, for which you were not prepared. You are in a world older than the Alps. The loneliness appals. Here Shelley might have written "The Spirit of Soli- tude." The view is archaic, but superb. Moun- tains to right of you, mountains to left of you, mountains in front and behind you — the Dome 136 THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE and Greylock to the north, Canaan Mountain and the Litchfield Hills to the east, Poconnuck and the Highlands of the Hudson to the south, with the faint line of the Shawangunks and there, grandest of all, looming against the west, the Catskills, with their bastions and peaks. Lakes flash and gleam; the eagle's scream blends with the gale. Up here, soon after the snow leaves the valleys, arbutus per- fumes the air; in early summer the mountain sides are pink with laurel. No one has ever understood Wordsworth, who has not stood by some lonely lake like these on Mount Riga, or better still, rowed out on them. "There sometimes doth a leaping fish Send throLigli the tarn a lonely cheer; The crags repeat the raven's croak In symphony austere." By taking an old wood road, one can pass through the northwest corner of the state. 'Tis a pleasure to find the spot, sit over it and dangle your legs in New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. If you are not a bachelor you will be in four states at once. How the Prayer Book loves that holy es- tate of matrimony! The corner of Connecticut was not always easy to find. The Charter of Charles II, under whose generous and humane pro- 137 GNADENSEE visions the people lived till 1818, granted all the land from "Narragansett Bay on the east to the South Sea on the west, with the islands thereunto adjoining," This located the northwest corner somewhere in the Western Reserve of Ohio, which was claimed for a long time as the foundation of a school fund ; according to others the corner was in the Aleutian Islands. Charles, though a mean king, was not mean with his Charter, since it gave Connecticut a strip of land seventy miles wide and extending one-eighth of the distance round the globe. The next stair is Bear Mountain, twenty-three hundred and fifty-five feet in height and crowned with a tower. This pyramid of stones, for such it is, was erected by Robbins Battell of Norfolk to mark the highest altitude in the state and is known as the Battell Tower. To reach it from Bald Peak one must keep the road to the north, then turn to the east, at a sign, and eventually leaving every- thing behind and below, clamber up with an occa- sional header into the bushes. It is a good stifif climb, but not impossible for young ladies. There is an essential satisfaction about a moderate ele- vation like Bear Mountain. It resembles the fam- ily coat of arms. 138 THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE "Nolo terrare Nescio timere." "I am unwilling to terrify and I know not how to be afraid." Great mountains, the Chimborazos and Popocatapetls, terrify. It is uncertain whether the man who has climbed them is a wise man or a fool. The rarefied air may bring on a hemorrhage. Men pay dearly for their boldness in attempting the highest peaks. Since the Matterhorn was first scaled in 1865, thirty lives have been sacrificed upon this "Fiend of the Alps," but the worst thing that can happen to you on Bear Mountain is to find that, when ravenously hungry, you forgot to take the key to the sardine box and that there is not a nail or spike on the mountain. There is a tale of pathos in this wild country around Bear Mountain. On the morning of Me- morial Day, 1889, a little boy, three years old, wandered into the woods and was lost. His pa- rents were respectable people, Bonhotel by name, who had emigrated from the Channel Islands. Their occupation was burning charcoal. The boy when last seen on that eventful day was playing near the barn. His brothers were away from the house in one direction and his parents in another, making charcoal, each supposing the boy to be with 139 GNADENSEE the other party; but when they came together at night he was not to be found. The entire family spent the night hunting with lanterns, but all to no avail — the boy was lost. Early the next day the village of Salisbury was aroused and fifty men entered upon the search. The news flew quickly and widely. By the third day two hundred men had enlisted. They came from all the surrounding country. Long lines of men, ten feet apart, ex- plored the mountain tract for miles. There was reason for alarm. A chilling rain had fallen from the first and the little fellow only had on a single garment. The rain chilled the searching parties to the marrow. Men got lost in the darkness, climbed trees and shouted to get out. They stum- bled and floundered about, nerved with despair and hope, a hope to find the boy's body, for the behef had now become general that he was dead. The morning of the fourth day dawned with no trace of the lost boy. By this time the news had traveled over the country. It was no longer a lo- cal matter. One thing was in favor of the search- ing parties — the sun came out at last. It was on the fourth day that two men, who had organized an independent search and spent all the forenoon exploring the forest around Bear Mountain, saw 140 THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE something moving in the bushes. One of them approached it, trembHng with excitement. It was not a fox but the lost boy. The man wrapped the boy in his own warm shirt, placed him in an old charcoal basket and then drove at full speed to the Bonhotel cabin. The boy was in a pitiable condition. His blouse was torn and be- draggled, his legs scratched by the bushes and his poor little fingers sucked to a point, but he was alive. As the two men flew on a mighty shout went up, "The boy is found ! the boy is found !" Men passed the news along the lines ; rose up out of the woods from everywhere. "Benledis' living side" never saw such a spectacle. The mountain road was alive with men and teams, all converg- ing on the Bonhotel cabin. Strong arms handed the boy to his mother. 'T is said she folded him to her heart, kissed him passionately, prayed over him, and then, when she reahzed that her lost Emil was safe, a light came into her face, such as the old masters put into the faces of their Madonnas. How did the boy live and what were his expe- riences during those days and nights in the woods? We do not know and we never shall. The heart- ache of the parents we can understand, but who can fathom the heart of a child? The mother said she 141 GNADENSEE found traces of bark in his mouth and the boy told the doctor by signs that he ate leaves. Some have thought that the little fellow was mentally afifected by his terrible experiences. 'T is said that after- wards he seemed like an elf child. However that may be, for years in Salisbury, where the Bonhotels came later to reside, Emil was known as "The Lost Boy." In the "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life"' there is the story of a babe that was carried ofif by an eagle. The mother had laid her sleeping child on the ground, when an eagle swooped down and bore it aloft to his eyrie. The mother's agony and the grief of all the people in the glen are depicted, and then, as by a miracle, a man, who had climbed to the rocky height, rescued the babe, sleeping quietly, and bore it to its mother. The Riga Moun- tains have their lights and shadows. One of them is this story of "The Lost Boy." Over behind Bear Mountain is Sage's Ravine. "God plowed one day with an earthquake And drove his furrows deep." The Ravine descends to the "Under Mountain Road," the gate and entrance to Southern Berk- shire. There are steep, mossy walls where a slip of the foot is fatal ; forest glooms shot through with 142 THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE scanty light and cooled by mists where the rain- bows dance. To ascend the Ravine to its head waters is like John Ridd's famous climb in Lorna Doone. The Ravine is no place to trifle with. Be- lated tourists have had to spend the night. It is awfully lonely to be up there alone, like that chasm Coleridge dreamed he saw in the domain of Kubla Khan at Xanadu, "A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover!" At this exact spot, however, the trout fishing is particularly good. Beecher knew the Ravine and loved its glooms and waterfalls. The streets of Brooklyn had no charm like this. There is one more stair to climb. It is over the line in Massachusetts and the grandest of them all. It dominates Southern Berkshire ; is the second highest mountain in Massachusetts, being twenty- six hundred and twenty-four feet and exceeded only by Greylock. It is rightly called "The Dome of the Taconics." It should be climbed just at sun- set. Whether seen from Lenox churchyard or ap- proached as the last in this Scala Regia, which as- cends from Gnadensee, it is majestic and impres- sive. Somewhere, in one of his letters, Webster 143 GNADENSEE writes, "O the sea, the sea and Marshfield!" Many a lover of Berkshire scenery, looking across the meadows of the Housatonic at Sheffield or floating idly over the Twin Lakes in Salisbury, has ex- claimed, "The Dome, The Dome and Berkshire!" On the Dome of the Taconics one stands under a vaster dome. Those stairs mounting up from the Lake of Grace are pillars along the aisle of some great cathedral. Ruskin says of the mountains, "They seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full of treas- ures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshiper. And of these great cathedrals of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars" Here the Ruskin meditation was broken by the vesper bell which called to worship. At the foot of The Dome the arbutus blooms abundantly and here at Sky Farm the Goodale sis- ters, Dora and Elaine, have sung sweetly about the flowers and birds of their beloved Berkshire. The fruitage has not equaled the buds of promise, but the poems came spontaneously. At the time of our 144 THE STAIRS OF GNADENSEE visit two Carolina or mourning-doves flew out of the apple-trees in the orchard. They seemed to say, "Since our Berkshire songsters have left their mountain nest and flown away, we mourn for them in the trees of Sky Farm." It was early spring, cool and wet. That line in Christabel was true, "The spring comes slowly up this way," but spring in Berkshire picks, with cold fingers, the arbutus blossoms from under the damp April leaves and takes that perfume which is the breath of love. 145 THE SOUL OF THE PINES "A grove of pines without underbrush, carpeted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resi- nous gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple wood, either in the insects, the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the sound of its leaves. If we lived in olden times among young mythologies, we should say that pines held the imprisoned spirits of naiads and water-nymplis, and that their sounds were of the water for whose lucid depth they always sighed. At any rate, the first pines must have grown on the seashore and learned their first accents from the surf and the waves; and all their posterity have in- herited the sound, and borne it inland to the mountains." — "A Walk Among Trees," — Henry Ward Beecher. THE SOUL OF THE PINES On the east shore of Gnadensee is a grove of pines to which already a reference has been made. These groves are a marked feature of the lakes and rivers in this region. They slope down to the shore of Lake Webotuck ; you find them on Long Pond above ; the cottages and tents of campers on the Twin Lakes peep out from among them ; on the road to Falls Village is an arcade of pines with the roaring, foaming Housatonic below, and in Cornwall Plains a little south of the village is one of the finest groves in the state. The Pinus Strobus, White or Weymouth pine, is the tallest, the most stately and beautiful of all our cone-bearing trees, sometimes reaching a height of one hundred and twenty feet. It is an ornament on park or lawn, standing often in the dooryard as a plumed and uniformed sentinel over 149 GNADENSEE the Lares and Penates of the home. The tree is most valuable economically and the uses to which it can be put are legion. Its name strobus was the designation of a Persian tree now unknown. Weymouth Pine is the name given to it in Eng- land ever since it was cultivated by Lord Wey- mouth. White Pine is the name by which it is commonly known and distinguished from six other species in the New England and Middle Atlantic states. The tree ranges from Newfoundland to Manitoba, is found in the southern Appalachians, grows at an altitude of four thousand three hundred feet in North Carolina and two thousand three hun- dred feet in the Adirondacks. It flourishes on sandy soil, especially that formed by the disintegration of granite rocks ; is a rapid grower, sending out its branches so thickly as to form a dense roof above and arranges its slender green needles in dehcate whorls of five. This grove at Gnadensee is a place where the carriage drives slowly and where if you are wise you will stop to catch the soul of the pines. The trunks tower above you like Corinthian columns, there is a soft brown carpet beneath your feet, a subdued light around, a stillness which is the hush of reverence and awe broken only by that con- 150 The Pines of Gnadensee THE SOUL OF THE PINES tinual murmur in the tree-tops and the ripple of the waves on the stony beach. The soul of the pines is the infinite sadness of the world. This world is out of harmony with it- self. Things do not move in accordance with the aim and end of creation. Sin has disarranged the cosmos. There is friction, suffering, misery un- speakable. Man and nature war against each other and struggle with themselves. Goethe somewhere says that nature is like an imprisoned spirit longing and striving to be free. There is a great world sor- row, a bondage of corruption. This bondage was not inherent and original, but came with sin. It has pleased God to so link creation with man's destiny that it shares in his present degradation and is emancipated only at his future glorification. We do not relieve this sadness by saying that the sur- vival of the fittest is the law of nature or even God's law. The survival of the fittest is not al- ways the survival of the best. The soul of the pines is this deep sadness of the world, but a sad- ness that feels also the hopeful breath of eternity. In the pines you feel that the ocean is near. Those low, soft sounds are the susurrus of the soul or the murmur of the sea. In the piney woods of Cape Cod, before you emerge you can hear the T5I GNADENSEE monotone of the surf, and as you come nearer, the long, resounding roar and thunderous pounding of the breakers. The pine belt extends all along the great Atlantic plain, and one born in it who must live far inland is always homesick for the scent of the pines. The old Berserker spirit is in his blood. Dwellers on the prairie and in the pine woods can never understand each other. The New England poets have all felt this soul of the pines calling to the sea for its deep, sad answers. "Its cloudy boughs singing as suiteth the pine, To snow-bearded sea-kings old songs of the brine." — Lowell. The drip of the salt spray and the rage of the northeaster is in the pines of Plymouth and Marshfield just as when the Pilgrims landed. The pine is the tree of the Northland, the ar- morial design and fighting plume of the old Norse warriors. There have been three zones of con- quest and civilization ; they are represented by the palm, the olive and the pine. The palm land is that of the fierce Arab. Out of his desert wastes he has swept on the wings of the simoom to force upon the world his science and religion. Had it not been for Charles Martel and his Franks, the banners of Islam would float to-day 152 THE SOUL OF THE PINES over the capitals of Europe and the mosques of the caUphs would supplant the cathedrals. The realm, of the olive is the fair land of south- ern Europe. In the' clear Attic air and on those islands scattered like gems in the sapphire seas, every object stood out distinctly — the temple on the height, the long, thin smoke of the volcano, the slopes where the bees of Hymettus made their honey and the marbles of Pentelicus were quarried. The Rulers of the South, as Marion Crawford calls them, dwelt here. Beauty was worshiped. Greek heroes sculptured on the Parthenon were deified on Olympus. The land of the pine was different from either or both. Gloomy mountains, boulder-strewn wastes, heath and moor, endless forests of fir, low- ering skies, howling storms, the heaving, moaning sea surrounded the Teuton and the Norseman. If Greek mythology was a religion of beauty, the Norse was a religion of strength. It is to the Niebelungen-Lied and old Norse Eddas that we must look for the spiritual gianthood of Carlyle and Goethe. Emerson says, "Out of unhandseled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berser- kers, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare." The composers and musicians of the North have ^53 GNADENSEE all felt the soul of the pines. Handel, Mozart and Beethoven have strains too sacred for a dance of the nymphs. Ole Bull does not pipe a shepherd's ditty to a flock on Sicilian hills, but you hear in his violin the sighing of Norwegian' firs, the shriek of the wind, the voice of the waterfall, the runes of Scald and Viking, catching in the interludes of his playing the wild, weird music of the Northern Sea. The men of the pine lands are the men of strength and freedom always. Arminius and his Germans broke the power of the legionaries ; Lu- ther defied and curbed the Papacy. Gustavus Adolphus, Hampden, Cromwell, Washington, Lin- coln, all breathed this spirit of the pines. That is a grand sentence in King'sley in which he gathers up and puts into the death of Hereward, those in- fluences which, let loose, have made the British and American peoples. It is the soul of the pines. "And they talked and sung of Hereward and all his doughty deeds, over the hearth in lone farmhouses, or in the outlaw's lodge beneath the hollins green; and all the burden of their song was, 'Ah, that Hereward were alive again !' for they knew not that Hereward was alive for- ever more; that only his husk and shell lay mouldering there in Crowland choir; that above them, and around them, and in them, destined to raise them out of that bitter bondage, and mould them into a great nation, and the pa- THE SOUL OF THE PINES rents of still greater nations in lands as yet unknown, brooded the immortal spirit of Hereward, now purged from all earthly dross, even the spirit of Freedom, which can never die." This mighty repubHc, so big with achievement and destiny, pulses with this spirit of freedom, law- less though it be at times. Too busy in making an epic to stop to sing it, when that epic is written it will have the soul and spirit of the pines. Amiel says, "They (the pines) recalled to me the poetry of the North, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland, or Sweden, Frithjof and the Edda, Ossian and tlie Hebrides. All that world of cold and mist, of genius and reverie, where warmth comes not from the sun but from the heart, where man is more noticeable than nature, — that chaste and vigorous world, in which will plays a greater part than sensation, and thought has more power than instinct, — in short, the whole romantic circle of German and Northern poetry awoke little by little in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry of bracing quality and acts upon one like a moral tonic." The soul of the pines is health. Therefore in- valids and consumptives seek the piney sands of Aiken and the forests of Saranac. The pines give out oxygen and thus purify the air for respiration. Man consumes this oxygen, breathing it back into the air in the form, of carbonic acid. The pines 155 GNADENSEE keep the carbon, and so the process goes on end- lessly. There is no waste, no excess. The pines of Gnadensee are not confined to the grove which has been mentioned. There are many noble trees scattered along the western shore. Rounding a point of land one day we saw a tent of campers among them. It must be romantic to sleep out here in the moonlight, aye, to be buried in such a spot. One thinks of the old Norse lovers, "When round the hills the pale moonlight is thrown And midnight dews fall on the Bauta-stone We'll sit, O Thorsten, in our rounded graves And speak together o'er the gentle waves." There is a tenderness of the pine which is most pathetic. It does not reproduce itself with the vigor of other trees. As soon as it is cut down the root dies ; there is no power to send up new shoots from the stump, as in the maple. The seed is light and cannot germinate except under the most favor- able conditions. As Darwin says, "the Oaks have driven the Pines from the sands." The axe and the wooden house sound the knell of the pine groves ; the brown needles beneath your feet recall a lost and vanished race, a race of noble trees and stately men. 156 THE SOUL OF THE PINES There is no such beautiful tree in all the woods as a perfect pine. The individual pine has a beauty it can never acquire in the dense grove, for the lower branches have a chance to grow. On two occa- sions the writer has seen this perfection of the in- dividual pine. The first was from a car window in southern New Hampshire, at sunset. The tree stood alone out in a field. It was the picture of the burning bush, burning but unconsumed, every bough a shaft of light and all that cloud of needles and every faintest tip a mass of scintillant fire. The other was on the Italian lakes. Passing down Lago Maggiore we landed at Isola Bella, one of the Borromean Isles. Here was a nobleman's chateau with its fairy grotto. Napoleon's bed, and superb vue du lac, the white villas dotting the shores, and the snow-covered Alps in the dis- tance. It was the home of the mulberry and the vine. We were conducted into the jardin. Here were shrubs and trees from every clime growing in a climate fit for Paradise Regained, — the eucalyp- tus, the cypress pyramid, oleanders, strange trees from Australia, but there was one tree which stood out alone, the most beautiful of all. It was the Pinus Strobus or White Pine of North America, the same we had seen so often in boyhood ; those 157 GNADENSEE groves stretching away to the Marshfield Hills of old Plymouth County, with the Atlantic out there somewhere in the haze, three thousand miles of open ocean to the hills of Spain. The beauty of the tree may have been enhanced by tender as- sociations and a touch of homesickness, but it seemed like those which in Jotham's fable had a voice. The pines of Gnadensee are just as beautiful as this one on Lago Maggiore, but some- how we never appreciate the common until it is rare. Did these pines grow only on Isola Bella people would cross the ocean to see them. As one lingers in this grove by the Lake of Grace he thinks of that old Accadian Paradise whose "tree of life" was "the holy pine" of Eridu, the garden and the sacred river being a legend of man's lost Eden. 158 AN OLD ORE BED "Life is not as idle ore, But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And battered with the shocks of doom To shape and use." — "In Memoriam," Tennyson. AN OLD ORE BED At the foot of Indian Mountain, lying between it and the Lake of Grace, is an old ore bed. It is a "dead pit" once used in surface mining but now abandoned. Following the road northward around the mountain to Ore Hill there is a "live pit" where still the brown hematite is dug out and carried to the foundry to be cast into car wheels. It is claimed that no better ore for this purpose exists anywhere. It has a remarkable tensile strength and toughness, combined with a harden- ing of the surface, that adapts it to the require- ments of rolling-stock. Like the shipmasters of Cape Cod, the ironmasters of Salisbury have long made this region famous, forming an aristocracy of wealth and ability. Before the Revolutionary War even iron mining was carried on here. The Connecticut Geological Report for 1837 says, "The best Salisbury iron has obtained a decided prefer- 161 GNADENSEE ence over all other iron, either foreign or domestic, for the construction of musket and rifle barrels." Although at the present time the output of Salis- bury iron is belittled by the immense productions of the South and West, where ores can be mined at cheaper rates, and though there is no demand for gun metal since the introduction of Bessemer steel, still this iron maintains its high standard and its manufactured products are sold as fast as made. A visit to these mines at Ore Hill reminds one of the battle of the angels in Paradise Lost, who "pluck'd the seated hills with all their load," "main promontories flung," until the air was full of pon- derous missiles. You seem to be on a battle-field of the Titans. The great pits and heaps of earth, verdureless and brown, the red silt of the mine flowing over the fields, are unnatural to the landscape. But it is as one descends into the pit that he finds the weirdest fascination. It is a veritable descent into the In- ferno, and the inscription that Dante saw over the gates of hell might with propriety be written over the black hole through which you are lowered, three hundred feet, into the bowels of the earth. "Through me the way is to the city dolent, Through me the way is to eternal dole, All hope abandon, ye who enter in !" 162 AN OLD ORE BED The most productive mine for a long time has been the famous "Brook Pit" which shows no sign of exhaustion although the tunnels run far out un- derground. A force of seventy-five men takes out daily as many tons of ore. This ore is screened, crushed, washed, loaded on cars and taken to the furnace in Lime Rock, where it is made into car wheels. The "Brook Pit" is in charge of skilled Cornish miners who are very courteous to visitors. To descend into the mine one must dress for it and wear rubber boots, for when he comes out he is sure to have more iron on his clothes than in his blood. Lying low in the iron truck, so that the head cannot strike the timbers above, you are rap- idly lowered down the shaft by a steel cable. There are landings at different levels, whence gal- leries and tunnels branch off, at the end of which one finds the miners at work with pick, shovel, powder and dynamite. Every one going down into the mine is supplied with candles set into an iron handle. This has a sharp point which can be driven anywhere into the sides of the mine. With- out candles the mine would be the blackness of darkness forever, but there is little danger if one is careful and obeys his guide. It is a queer sen- sation at first, partly that of being buried alive 163 GNADENSEE and partly that of carrying the world on your shoulders. The darkness is intense but the air is cool and sweet ; there is none of the deadly fire- damp found in the coal-mines and the purest drinking water trickles down through the iron seams. Your geologic instinct looks continually for trilobites and crystals. No reptiles live at these deep levels where God has stored the earth with wealth. Better for man and more useful in every way are these iron mines than the gold fields. It is a satisfaction also to know something of the earth beneath before you rest in it at last. Imag- ination is aroused, you see rocks in stratified for- mation, "giant ichthyosaurs splashing in Jurassic oceans," and make a theological excursus into Shcol and Hades. The Psalmist had a terror of becoming "like them that go down into the pit," but the experience is a great help in the appreciation of Dante. Hell, as he explored it with Virgil, lay directly under Jerusalem in the form of a hollow inverted cone, divided into nine concentric circles, each devoted to the punishment of a different class of sins. The Ninth Circle was the Frozen Lake of Cocy- tus with its four divisions for Traitors to Kindred, 164 AN OLD ORE BED Country, Friends and Benefactors. This is the low- est pit of all. Here is Satan or Lucifer. It was no light journey to reach this pit. There was no iron truck worked by steam and a humane engi- neer in the power-house above. Dante and Virgil were seated on the back of Geryon, a monster, part dragon, part serpent and part man. Like one who had the ague and whose nails are blue al- ready, Dante bestrode those "monstrous shoul- ders." Down, down they went, through air, through water, through fires and lamentations, un- til Geryon landed them at the bottom with Satan in the very nethermost hell. The Satan of Milton is grand, this of Dante repulsive. He has three heads, is crunching a sinner in each mouth and down his chins "trickle the tear-drops and the bloody drivel." Judas Iscariot has the hardest time. Poor Judas ! Satan has him half swallowed. With head inside those awful jaws he plies his legs without. Dante was glad to get out of this horrid place. Again he bestrode Geryon, that beastly elevator, and when the poet came forth into the bright world the morning stars were shining. They were the stars of Easter. On Good Friday the descent began; on Easter morning it was left behind to be fixed in 165 GNADENSEE literature forevermore. What shall be said of this astounding piece of realism? The age has out- grown it, the Bible never taught it ; nevertheless it is not useless. Sin and retribution are awful facts. Evil is not good in the making, but only evil con- tinually. The earnestness of Dante's purpose makes us tolerant of his awful descriptions. Sin is not salacious to him but loathsome and abhor- rent ; it is not a mere phase of environment and heredity, as we are told to-day, but intensely indi- vidualistic. It is no wonder that, as the great poet genius walked the streets of Verona, the people exclaimed, "Eccovi Vuom die' e siafo alV Inferno." (See, there is the man that was in hell !) The Bible as well as Dante is appreciated in "Brook Pit." It is passing strange that the twenty- eighth chapter of Job, which is such a graphic pic- ture of ancient mining, should still be applicable to the working of this mine in Salisbury. "That path no bird of prey knoweth, Neither hath the falcon's eye seen it : The proud beasts have not trodden it." The miner's path is one which is known to neither beast nor bird. Man's wisdom and inge- nuity are superior to the sights and instincts of the animals. i66 AN OLD ORE BED It is man alone who penetrates deeply into the earth. No birds fly, no animals have their dens in these subterranean realms. The miner's world is all his own ; he scoops it out for himself and rules in it as king-. "He cutteth out channels among the rocks ; And his eye seeth every precious thing." This may refer to man's ability to cut canals and tunnels or change the course of rivers, as was done at the siege of Babylon. We give the ancients too little credit for their knowledge of engineering. Herodotus, Aristotle and Pliny speak of canals in Egypt antedating by thousands of years DeLes- sep's great cut at Suez. The history of the Lost Arts and Forgotten Sciences has yet to be written. The verse, however, probably refers to work un- dertaken in the mines for the carrying ofi of water. Diodorus Siculus says that when subterranean springs were accidentally tapped the workmen would construct ducts and channels to carry the danger- ous waters to a lower level, just as they were doing in "Brook Pit." The miner's eye saw every pre- cious thing. He was always on the lookout for sapphires and gold-dust. And what is the result of all this toil? Why, that out of the heart of the earth and out of the pit's 167 GNADENSEE mouth may be brought forth that with which our bread and clothes are purchased. There are two forgotten heroes who toil for us and are in danger continually. One swings on reeling masts over the white surges, the other delves in the heart of the earth. In a country like Great Britain, which cannot feed her population, the well-being and ex- istence of the state depend absolutely on the sail- ors and miners. The strike of the anthracite min- ers in the coal-fields of Pennsylvania threatened to paralyze the industries of the United States. Call agriculture the basis of trade and civilization, yet the farmer's work is not the most heroic. He works in the green fields, under the blue sky and the glorious sun. The miner's path and toil are in darkness, amid unwholesome gases and in what is often a living tomb. This old ore bed has many lessons. Men have been burrowing here for a century and a half, dig- ging the burrow farther and deeper all the time, Man is a burrowing animal. He digs a cellar in the earth where he may find an equable tempera- ture and store his crops. When the house is burned the cellar or burrow remains. It was a bright thought of Thoreau's, that a man's house is only the entrance to his burrow. 1 68 AN OLD ORE BED In an earlier chapter of this book we were told that the Moravians were called "Pitmen" or "Bur- rowers." The story of underground Christianity is ever its most thrilling chapter. The "Pitmen" or "Bur- rowers" have a noble ancestry. The most impres- sive moments in the Eternal City are not as you stand in the splendid churches of the popes or amidst the ruins of the Colosseum, but in those sub- terranean galleries which underlie the Campagna. There are forty-five of these hidden cemeteries whose labyrinthine paths extend five hundred and forty-five miles. They are, as Dean Stanley aptly says, the "Pompeii of ancient Christianity." In this city of the dead seven million loculi or resting- places have already been found, showing to what extent the early Church had grown in less than four centuries. As one follows his monkish guide with, lighted taper through these narrow, tortuous ways, he can see the lone procession coming here to worship or bury their dead. That processiou was a grander sight than the legions marching along the Appian Way on their return from world- wide conquest. Tlie magnificent stairway of the Vatican has on one side the marbles stripped from the now dismantled pagan tombs that line the Via 169 GNADENSEE Appia for a distance of five miles out from the Porta Sebastiano. There are tender, hopeless in- scriptions. Hands are clasped in that "Vale, vale, eternum vale," which speaks of no hereafter. On the opposite side are the marbles which have been taken from the resting-places of the Christians in the Cata- combs. The symbols are those of a deathless joy, the palm branch of victory, the olive leaf of peace, the picture of the open Bible and of the Shepherd carrying the sheep upon his shoulder. There are no emblems of suffering, but hope, joy, rest, victo- rious forces defeating Roman cruelty and death's gloom; a far-seeing faith catching the light of an endless day from the dungeon darkness of the Catacombs. Before we left the mine the obliging foreman de- tached for us a beautiful crystal which even there was lustrous. So the Bible has nuggets of truth, sapphires and gems of infinite value. Set in the ore of literature they flash in the white light of inspiration. Our personality and character are in the ore, too. We need God's fire to set loose and purify the metal. As the foreman visits these miners so Christ once went and preached to the 170 AN OLD ORE BED spirits in prison, announcing- to the saints and worthies of Old Testament times that now their detention and stay in Sheol were ended. Not there as doomed or lost souls, but holy men awaiting a great deliverance, they went up with him in resur- rection triumph to a Paradise beyond the stars. This old ore bed showed not only the desirabil- ity of resurrection for the saints, but it solved that vexed problem of modern society, what to do with the sinners. Hell is always a convenient place for those whom we do not like. Swedenborg says he saw John Calvin in hell. Why should n't the gov- ernment buy this old mine and put all the anar- chists into it ; let them experiment down there with their bombs and infernal machines? The beauty of the thing is not only its humanity but its cheapness. There would be no possible way of getting out ex- cept by the narrow entrance, which four soldiers could guard. Let bread be slid down on the truck, (water would be abundant) ; let explosives be test- ed for heavy ordnance, dynamite being supplied by the government. In this way the anarchists would advance scientific knowledge and all the living de- serve a pension. 171 A VILLAGE STREET "The elms of Sharon! The very words bring before the mind's eye the typical New England street — that long, wide, shady stretch upon which the sober, substantial residences front, each originally with its home lot running back in- definitely, and with a wood lot somewhere in the distant rear. The Puritan was faithful to this attractive plan for his village plot, wherever he migrated within New Eng- land borders ; very seldom is there an example outside of it," — Myron B. Benton. A VILLAGE STREET As one comes up from the Lake of Grace he be- holds a village perched" on one of the long terraces of the Taconic range. The village does not run up the terrace but follows it. Descending the high- lands of the Housatonic to the west, you would not know there was a village at all, so completely is it hidden ; at one point all than can be seen is the delicate spire of the Congregational church far below in a green valley. One is not prepared for the beauty which bursts upon him. Like all sud- den revelations, it holds him in a spell. It is a most fortunate thing that the fathers of the town did not build their village where they had surveyed to locate it. In that case there would have been a cluster of white houses on a bleak wind-swept mountain, but one of the finest streets in New England would have been only a cow pas- ture. Had they been equally sagacious in allowing GNADENSEE a railroad to enter the town a mile below the vil- lage the magnetism of this age of steel would have drawn a population which had caused their village to become widely known. And yet there is a val- ue in isolation. There are some places you would keep just as they are. The tramps cannot reach them, great factories do not disturb them, the trolley cars do not shake the houses, the sidewalks are not black with human units. The restless, trad- ing, cursing world is all outside and beyond. " 'T is pleasant, through the loopholes of retreat To peep at such a world ; to see the stir Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd." Such is Sharon with its broad green street, a street which extends for a mile and a half, and the archi- tecture of whose oldest houses recalls the days of George Washington and George the Third. Sharon Street is the Ultima Thule of New Eng- land civilization. It looks over into Duchess County, that domain of Diedrich Knickerbocker where they called the minister the Dominie, built stoups to their houses, called mush supazvn and a rent in a garment a zvinklc-hawk. Village greens, town governments and jealous little democracies stop at Sharon Street. Of the street in general it may be said that two 176 A VILLAGE STREET roads, an upper and a lower, on opposite sides of the common, run under the elms until they meet below the Library. There by the clock-tower an- other common begins, stretching away with a sug- gestion of abundant room. In the summer the street is an oasis of verdure. Back of it are long lilac hedges and behind the hedges, set in velvet lawns shaded by noble trees, are homes of elegance and comfort. At the north end of the street the mountains burst upon you, Poconnuck with dark, shaggy sides, the Riga group and Bear Mountain. Leav- ing here the old street, which, running under a hill, clings like a limpet to a rock, and climbing some high ground to the east, Mount Everett with the Catskills can be seen. In the spring, when the streams are full and the falls can be heard in the still evenings, a walk down to them is not amiss. The fresh smell of the foaming water is mingled with the fragrance of mint, while the roar of the cascades is softened by the sighing of the hem- locks in the glen. To get the southern view one should walk down to the golf links. Here you are on a plateau with mountains all around you. It is an ideal spot in which to spend a sumnier morning, or when the long 177 GNADENSEE shadows of the afternoon betoken the approach- ing- sunset. Looking down the Webotuck Valley there are pastoral views suggestive of English landscape ; the ridges billow away, fold on fold, un- til they melt in the hazy blue. Cobble Mountain, Weeputting or the "tooth mountain," as the In- dians called it, dominates the view. Oblong Mountain extends for miles and then breaks grand- ly at Wassaic. Chestnut Ridge on the further side of a parallel valley extends to Dover Plains. Sharon Street has a decided air of colonial an- tiquity. The oldest house is of brick and was built, as the inscription indicates, by John Penoyer in 1757. George II was then king of England and William Pitt his prime minister. The colonies were engaged in that momentous struggle which was to decide whether Bourbon absolutism or An- glo-Saxon freedom should control the destinies of this Western continent. It was a time when Wal- pole said, "We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is, for fear of losing one." Rob- ert Clive was laying the foundation of British do- minion in India, Watts was testing the power of steam, Gray's Elegy had been published only six years before. Oliver Goldsmith, toiling in a Lon- don garret, was soon to delight the world by pub- 178 A VILLAGE STREET lishing "The Vicar of Wakefield," and in an "auld clay biggin" on the banks of bonnie Doon was to be born a bard whose songs were destined to be sung wherever the English language is spoken. If John Penoyer laying bricks on Sharon Street did not feel all this, he knew, when the Colonial army had captured Louisburg and Ticonderoga was evac- uated, that the world was stirring sleepy Sharon. The Governor Smith House, built during the Revolution, is not only one of the finest specimens of colonial architecture but one of the few historic houses now standing in the United States. It is a stone structure. Italian workmen were imported and used some secret process in tempering their mortar. The cement is so hard to-day that the walls are in perfect preservation. The house is filled with most valuable manuscripts, portraits and fur- niture. In the basement are the old slave quarters; in the rooms above met some of the most distin- guished people of the day. In the garret behind the rose window were found the diaries and data for that most interesting book, ''Colonial Days and Ways." The house has been written about so fully that it needs no lengthy description here. Suffice it to say that it was the home of John Cotton Smith, who served six years in Congress at the be- 179 • GNADENSEE ginning of the last century and was afterward suc- cessively lieutenant-governor and governor of the state. Nequitimaug, the residence of the Misses Wheel- er, stands back among noble trees. A house can be built in a year but trees like these require a century to grow in. Here is the Stirling Elm, pre- eminent in size among his fellows. Here, until the storm of 1893, stood a gigantic white ash, the Council Tree of the Indians. Long before the set- tlement of Sharon by the whites the Wequagnock Indians had planned many a wild foray under its branches or smoked the pipe of peace. When the Rev, Cotton Mather Smith's house stood under it the older Indians would gather at certain sea- sons to relate their traditions to the younger men of the tribe. Mr. Smith, who knew their language well, would take advantage of these gatherings to preach to them in their own tongue, and he and his wife would always see that their red friends had a good dinner in the shade of their favorite tree. It has come down in unbroken tradition that in 1754 the tree was just as large as it was fifty years later, and saving for a slightly thinner foliage toward the last, there was little outward change in its appear- ance till it fell. 180 A VILLAGE STREET It is quite appropriate that the place and grounds here should bear the name Nequitimaug, that chief and leader of the Sharon Indians. His name ap- pears first on the deed by which they transferred their lands and he was also a Moravian convert. In the Goodwin house opposite is a certificate of discharge for Hezekiah Goodwin of the Revolution- ary Army, signed by the Father of his Country, stating that Corporal Goodwin had been honored with the Badge of Merit for his faithful service. The government has tried in vain to get this covet- ed autograph of Washington's. Northward a long avenue of approach ends abruptly in a brick mansion whose gables have looked out on three centuries. It is one of those houses never asking to be described because it inevitably compels it. While other things have changed it has been a landmark to generations of the villagers. If Mary Wilkins Freeman had ever seen it, there would have been a quaint story about Dutch Doors and Dormer Windows. It is hoped that the present interest in colonial architecture may long spare this specimen, which links the lives of all the presidents, whose walls, true to line and plummet, cannot be shaken down and whose doors, quaintly hung, swing inward from the middle in i8i GNADENSEE retrospect of ancient hospitality or look out, in hope, upon the century to be. As one walks down the street to where John Penoyer began to lay his bricks, English and Amer- ican history from George the Second to Theodore Roosevelt, unrolls itself. Unrolls itself ! — unearths itself one might also say. Not long ago, in the fields near by some copper coins were found. By a singular sequence three of them were in the reign of the Georges, The first coin was stamped Georgius Rex 1724; the second, Georgius II Rex 1740; the third, Georgius III Rex 1766. Ameri- cans do not love these kings of the house of Bruns- wick. The first two had characters which -we cannot respect, and George the Third was a tyrant, whose insolence the colonies resented. Yet there were those who never threw off kingly allegiance. In the writings of Connecticut women there is a very pretty story, "For Her King's Sake," by Miss Helen Evertson Smith. The heroine was a mother- less girl, sheltered here when Burgoyne's officers and troopers were prisoners of war. The scene of the story is laid in the "Old Stone House," and the girl, who was an ardent Tory, managed to release two of the prisoners who wore the king's uniform, though, as it proved, they were only too ready to 182 A VILLAGE STREET desert. For her king's sake she did it, that same king whose tea the Boston Mohawks threw into the harbor. Sharon was an asyhim and city of refuge during the Revolution for the harassed patriots along the Hudson. They were there in the path of war and invasion, but here in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, comparatively safe. Litchfield County was as strong for independence as Duchess was for Toryism and the king. Ever since Oliver Wolcott of Litchfield signed the Declaration of Independ- ence and its citizens brought the leaden statue of George III from Bowling Green, New York, and melted it into bullets to fight the battles of the Revolution, the air of this old mountain county had not suited Tory lungs. If Burgoyne's Hes- sians had made a raid into Litchfield County they might have fared even worse than they did at Ben- nington. Sufftce it to say that Sharon Street was filled with refugees, not "kings in exile," but the king's rebellious subjects. Here came the Van Rensselaers and the Livingstons from their manors on the Hudson. There was quite a colony, people of rank and quality. There were probably more people on Sharon Street then than now. There is a strange interest which attaches to 183 GNADENSEE these patriot refugees. Patroons and lords of the manor could be patriots as well as Tories. The Livingstons were one of the most distinguished families in early American history and related to people here. Livingston Manor, granted to Robert Livingston in Columbia and Duchess Counties, fronted for twelve miles along the Hudson and ex- tended back thirty miles from the rivei. The owner was a man of unusual cultivation and force of character. Wealthy New Yorkers to-day have yachts moored by splendid estates on the same noble river, which carry them to the very ends of the earth. These old lords of the manor had their sloops to carry furs to New York and bring back costly plate and tapestries which had come from over the sea. The burial of Philip Livingston in 1749 is thus described in a journal of the day. There was a double ceremony, one in New York city, the other at the Livingston Manor. "In the city, the lower rooms of most of the houses in Broad Street, wliere he resided, were thrown open to re- ceive visitors. A pipe of wine was spiced for the occasion, and to each of the eight bearers, with a pair of gloves, mourning ring, scarf and handkerchief, a monkey-spoon^ was ^ This was so called from the figure of an ape or mon- key which was carved in solido at the extremity of the handle. It differed from a common spoon in having a circular and very shallow bowl. 184 A VILLAGE STREET given. At the manor these ceremonies were all repeated, another pipe of wine was spiced, and besides the same presents to the bearers, a pair of black gloves and a handkerchief were given to each of the tenants. The whole expense was said to amount to five hundred pounds." Another Philip Livingston was one of the sign- ers of the Declaration of Independence. There is a great historical novel yet to be writ- ten. Its title will be "The Patroon." ' In these old feudal families along the Hudson the novelist will find abundant material and inspiration. Sharon Street has not only an air of colonial antiquity, but of modern enlightenment and ten- derness. Its library, built of the gray limestone found in the township, was given by Maria H. Hotchkiss, in memory of her husband, Benjamin Berkley Hotchkiss. The generosity of the origi- nal gift has lately been equaled by an ample en- dowment. The plan of the library is that of a St. Anthony's Cross, Two bay rooms used for reading are on either side of the nave, which is the library proper. The panels of stained glass in the north room bear the names of Homer, Virgil, Mo- liere and Goethe, with Dante's stern face looking down from the central one. They represent the genius of universal culture. The south room com- ^ The Dutch for patron. 185 GNADENSEE memorates the genius of the EngHsh-speaking race. The panels here have the names of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Frankhn, the central win- dow enshrining the face of our beloved Longfellow. Whoever reads the works of these poets is at home in all literatures and all languages. They show the difference between literature and information. After the many benefits of a village library are conceded, the people who use it aright are rela- tively few. The average American reads only news- papers. The people who know what is in a library, who visit it, take out books and look up refer- ences, are few. To use a library aright one must fall in love with it, must wish at times that instead of earning money for his daily bread he might live in an alcove of books and have his meals sent in to him. A village library is the proper place for an informal lecture or a reading-class. It is the post- graduate department and annex of the public school, a kind of university extension course, an asylum and place of refreshment for those who have been mentally starved. The building is only a skeleton without those books which are its life and soul. With books you hold the keys of all culture, can travel in all lands, hear the mule bells tinkle on the hills of Spain, climb the slopes of i86 A VILLAGE STREET Olivet and see auroras flash around the pole. The best books make us love and hate ; in rare moments they inspire. Those who love them may never be sages or heroes but they cannot be ignoble. Yet we have somewhat against the modern li- brary. It has produced Hctionitis, a new disease, which arrests mental growth and leaves no relish for the good old classics. Our fathers read Rasselas, Pope and Cowper. The tenderness of Sharon Street is its Clock- tower and Cemetery. The stone tower would be an architectural ornament to any village in Amer- ica, and there is many a city park and public square which would be only too glad to have it set down amid its lawns and flowers. Erected in 1884 to the memory of Mrs. Emily Butler Ogden Wheeler, its melodious bell peals out the hours. On the back of the tower is the inscription "Hours are golden links; God's token Reaching Heaven ; but one by one Take them lest the chain be broken Ere the pilgrimage be done." The tower is now the horologe and dial of the street. Every w^eek the clock is set exactly by the standard time at Washington. There is a legend of old dials on the church spire opposite, but mod- ern carpentry has long ago eflfaced them. There is 187 GNADENSEE no envy as there can be no rivalry. Nothing is weather-beaten yet on the tower. No medieval ogres salute you. One misses the cock that crew when Peter denied his Lord, the holy apostles who come out to parade just before the hour, but the Hme- stone so new and fresh is older than the tower of Babel. The tower says, "Already I have tolled the death and struck the dawn of a century. Long after you are gone and the dust gathers on mouldy tomes I shall stand amid my trees and verdure. Listen then to my lay and legend." DAS LIED VON DER GLOCKE Where the elm trees arch their branches To form a long arcade The village clock-tower standeth With holiest memories laid — A pile of soaring beauty Upon the green old street, To raise to higher levels And make our life complete. The lancets in its gray v^^alls Let the shafted sunlight through, And the great bell, in the belfry. Peals the hours, deep toned and true. It seems some old pagoda. Built o'er a sacred shrine With limestone from the quarry Of a far Silurian time; Twin dragons guard the entrance And, through the studded door, The sacristan goes often To wind the wondrous tower. i88 A VILLAGE STREET Like Giotto's Campanile By Brunelleschi's Dome, Hard by the village churches Stands this symphony in stone; The white doves crowd its windows, The belfry pigeon weaves Her nest, all unaffrighted, Beneath its sounding eaves. They say that once the dials Upon the village church Grew envious of its beauty Then hid their face and wept; The noonday bell was silent, The curfew ceased to toll, But now, in spire and clock-tower, They answer soul to soul. Like grave muezzin standing, Who callest unto prayer. Thy echoes break the stillness Of the palpitating air; The thoughtless stop to listen. The good are better made Who read the hours' inscription. Half hidden in the shade. In Schafifhausen's old cathedral The legend, on the bell,* Is that the bolts of thunder Were harmless when they fell ; Thy tones disarm our terror — And oft in holy hour * Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango. "I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the thunderbolts." It is an old belief current in Germany that the ringing of bells breaks the thunder-cloud and renders it harmless. 189 ' GNADENSEE Loved voices, long remembered, Call from the solemn tower : The wedding and the funeral Both get their time from thee, A horologe of mortal life, A voice of destiny. Thou art a hoary sentinel Upon the coast of time, To watch the heavens' starry march And hear their music fine; And when the great meridian Bends o'er our heads at noon The city of the presidents And clock-tower are in tune. Thou art the sad-faced trumpeter Of winter's spectral reign, Till red suns climbing up the sky Bring choirs of June again ; Then o'er the lawns, through arching trees, Thy four white faces show, Where the elms lift towers of verdure And the lilac hedges blow. Thy red roof burns at sunset When the dying day is warm, And through the long niglit shadows Faint glimmers to the dawn — A dawn of ampler beauty, For a century has whirled Whose jubilate pealing Rings o'er a glad new world ; A world wViose weal and glory Makes increase with the suns While dials tell their story And sand in hour-glass runs. 190 A VILLAGE STREET A step from the village street and, one is in the cemetery. With its amphitheater of mountains, a stranger would fain be buried here. Back to this old churchyard the wanderers come at last from all these hills and vales, from western mountains and from tropic gulf, to rest amid the scenes of their childhood. l"he committal is read over them and the tear falls that a place so naturally beautiful should have such a tender sadness. What Fanny Kemble said of Lenox churchyard is true of this : "I will not rise to trouble any one if they will let me sleep there. I will ask only to be permitted, once in a while, to raise my head, and look upon this glorious scene." One of the old-time customs on Sharon Street was the observance of the birthdays of elderly peo- ple. There were certain individuals belonging to the old families who literally held court on that day. Friends, neighbors, relatives, people from out of town, all came to pay their tribute of veneration and love. It was an event eagerly looked forward to, a tender survival of old-school manners and po- liteness. Not age but worthy age levied requisition and received its homage. Why not so everywhere? The elderly people are the chroniclers of village life, links in the tender chain of tradition. The 191 GNADENSEE passing of such souls is like the uprooting of noble trees. A quaint convex window, much prized by artists, on the east side of the street was the outlook of a godly clockmaker whose faith was an inheritance of the famous Apostle to the Indians. It is Eliot's window. In early summer the street is at its best. First comes the bursting into bloom of the lilac hedges and on the air is wafted the scents of some old- fashioned gardens. The elms erect towers of verdure and tipped with leaves to every utmost twig sway in aerial grace. Looking upon them one can un- derstand that reverence the Celtic Druids had for trees and how the quick-witted Greeks peopled their groves with dryads and gods of the wood. These elms are seers and prophets too. They seem to say, "We have the wisdom of Confucius and Soc- rates." Later the houses are full of life — city guests ar- rive and those who have traveled widely. Since the Spanish War New England life has taken on a certain languor and love of ease. Out on the evening air floats the music of a mandolin. A Spanish lady is playing arias and here on this old street with its Puritan strictness and ideals one thinks of A VILLAGE STREET "A land of lutes and witching tones, Of silver, onyx, opal stones; A lazy land, wherein all seems Enchanted into endless dreams." The charm of the street is in its far-away views. Often walled in so that you cannot see, one ap- preciates the privilege of reveling in space and distance. Harsh lines are not seen. You look down and off on beauty. Some visitors return to the street year by year. As the past is not a mem- ory but a part of yourself, so this street runs into the very life of the soul. Here the meridian's curve is beauty's line. A little village nestles among the Taconic Hills where talk is not of stocks but views, where tardy progress is frightened by automobiles and cheap trippers do not come. A German writer has said that every Englishman is an island, a taunt at national prejudice resented by the lords of the Seven Seas ; but no man whose home is under the village elms of New England can be taunted with his country birth. He is sure the world never had an ideal like this. In the winter the old street is lonely. There is no insect life ; the song-birds have flown. For a mile the great houses are closed. With no faces or lights in the windows you seem to be walking in a 193 GNADENSEE Campo Santo. A house is not a home if it is only occupied in summer. There are compensations, however. No leafy trees obstruct the view. The anatomy of the mountains can be seen. At the end of the clear, cold days they swim in purple light ; every morning you look out on Switzerland through the diaphanous air. When the gray goose begins to fly southward and the fierce northwest blasts howl around the house, you think of the great white silence which has settled down over the mountains and tundras of Alaska. That silence comes, to the old street, but it is a briefer robing. A PASTOR OF THE CHURCH MILITANT "Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve He taught, but first he folwed it himselve." — "The Canterbury Tales," Chaucer, "Whereas my birth and spirit rather took The way that takes the Town : Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring Book, And wrap me in a Gown : I was entangled in a World of strife, Before I had the power to change my life." George Herbert. A PASTOR OF THE CHURCH MILITANT The parish of the Congregational church in Sharon, Connecticut, inckided originally much of the land around the Lake of Grace. It was the day of long pastorates, large parishes and commanding influence on the part of the clergy. No history of a New England town could be written without mention of its clergy. Among the pastors of the Colonial and Revolutionary period few, if any, had a more direct participation in the stirring events of those days than the Rev. Cotton Mather Smith. His name reveals his ancestry, for he was related to all the Mathers and the Rev. John Cot- ton of Boston. As one of his ancestors was a major-general it was natural that he should be a pastor of the church militant. While a college stu- dent he was associated with Jonathan Edwards, in charge of a school which had been established among the Indians at Stockbridge, and was re- 197 GNADENSEE markable even among them for his feats of agility and strength. One of the most notable events in his earlier ministry was the visit of Whitefield in June, 1770, The great itinerant preacher had gone up the North River as far as Albany and Schenectady, preaching in all the towns and villages and, returning, had reached Sharon. Here, as elsewhere, there was considerable opposition to his being allowed to speak in the meeting-house, but Parson Smith's in- fluence was on the liberal side and the church doors were opened. For the benefit of the many strangers who came, an extensive scaffolding of seats was erected around the church. Whitefield was suffering from a severe attack of asthma, but Madam Smith spent the entire night in nursing him. It seemed at times as if he would die before morning, but after a little sleep he was able to preach a sermon all the more impressive because he had been so near the eternal world. His voice had not failed. It was the vox celeste, that same voice the colliers of Bristol had heard as the tears made white channels down their grimy cheeks, which drew the crowds at the Haymarket, going forth at candle light in the London fog, a voice heard on the moors of Scotland, and in those deep 198 A PASTOR OF THE CHURCH MILITANT underground passages, where the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea above him, a voice which had in it the Hghtning of the Apocalypse and the sweet persuasiveness of a seraph. Three months later he died at Newburyport, but not be- fore sending to Parson Smith and his wife a most tender letter of thanks and farewell. The Revolutionary War found Parson Smith in the maturity of his powers, and, like the Congre- gational clergy generally, without one particle of Toryism. His sermons, prayers and hymns at this time breathe a martial spirit. When the news of the battle of l^exington reached Sharon, on a Sab- bath morning. Parson Smith announced it from his pulpit and so infused the spirit of patriotic resist- ance into his flock that at the close of the service a company of one hundred men lined up on the village street, prepared to march to the scene of ac- tion. But he was not content with arousing oth- ers. During the momentous campaign of 1775 he was a chaplain in the Northern army, serving the Fourth Connecticut Regiment, which, under Col- onel Hinman, marched to Ticonderoga. Here he was dangerously ill of camp fever. There is a thrilHng story connected with one of his sermons. It was on a Sunday in October, 1777, 199 GNADENSEE after the terrible reverses to the Continental army. Burgoyne was advancing from^ the north, and the patriot cause seemed all but lost. Parson Smith ascended the pulpit and announced his text, "Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, The morning cometh" (Is. 21 : 11, 12). With great sympathy he spoke of the late reverses until the stern faces of his Puritan congregation were bathed in tears. Then his tone changed. "Our weakness," he said, "is the Lord's opportunity. He has permitted our past humiliation that our sins might be punished and that he might show us that he is mighty to save. . . . Behold ! the morning now cometh. I see its beams already gilding the mountain tops. Its brightness is already bursting over all the land." The scene that followed is best described in the words of the family tradition and authorship : "He closed his Bible and stood with uplifted hand, while a silence, as of expectation, fell alike upon the preacher and hearers. Then, during the solemn hush which preceded the benediction, could be distinguished from afar the hasty clatter of a horseman dashing into the village from the north. All knew that the sacred stillness of a New England Sabbath would not be broken without good reason. The eager horseman makes directly . for the church. Hope is triumphant over fear, but with hope is mingled terror, and anxious eyes blaze out from blanched faces as the rider, springing from his horse, 200 A PASTOR OF THE CHURCH MILITANT enters the church, his spurs clanking along the uncarpeted floor and up the pulpit stairs. The parson, his face flush- ing with the joy of a hope fulfilled, read only the three words, 'Burgoyne has surrendered,' and then burst into honorable tears. The next moment, calmed and solemn, he said, 'Let us thank God for this great mercy.' And, moved by a common impulse, the whole congregation rose to the Puritan posture of prayer — the erect posture of the Ironsides, who prayed and fought and kept their powder dry." — Colonial Days and Ways. In those days the Webotuck Valley was a vast wheat-field and granary for the Revohitionary army. At one time when the crop was endangered by the heavy rains, Parson Smith dismissed his congregation to save it, himself and family leading in the work. The soldiers who fought the battles of freedom must be fed. There is a beautiful story that when Sharon was visited by a scourge of the small-pox in the winter of 1784-85 and one-third of the population had the dreaded disease, Parson Smith and his devoted wife "spent their entire time in close attention up- on the sick and dying." George Herbert says that "The Parson's Completeness" requires him to practise the healing art and that the Parson's wife must be a mother and nurse of the sick. With Dr. Bellamy, Parson Smith divided the honor of making his home a school of the prophets. 201 GNADENSEE That was before the days of theological seminaries and, in some respects, better. The good man was ordained in Sharon, August 28, 1755, and died November 27, 1806, in the sev- enty-sixth year of his age and the fifty-second of his ministry. In 1805 he preached his half-century sermon from the text, "Now lettest thou thy serv- ant depart in peace, .... for mine eyes have seen thy salvation" (Luke 2 : 29, 30). We smile at these old New England divines, with their long sermons and grim theology, who were willing to be damned for the glory of God and wanted you to be, but had it not been for them, we might now be living under a king. They in- vented systems of theology, reveled in discussions on the divine decrees, man's depravity and moral inability. They rode over these hills to adjust and vindicate the moral government of God, to prove the freedom of the will, even if it was n't free. It may do to smile at them from our safe distance, but if we could venture to argue with them, they would put us in their vest pocket, for they were giants in thought and intellect. The moral lever- age of our reforms all comes from them. 202 SHEKOMEKO "Into the Silent Land ! Ah! who shall lead us thither? Clouds in the evening sky more darkly gather, And shattered wrecks lie thicker on the strand. "Tender morning-visions Of beauteous souls ! The Future's pledge and band ! Who in Life's battle firm doth stand, Shall bear Hope's tender blossoms Into the Silent Land !" From the German of Salis. SHEKOMEKO There are three drives in America which are famous and one which is remarkable. The surf booms and breaks against a rock-bound coast at Cohasset, where the Jerusalem Road winds be- tween the villas and the sea; the genius of Holmes and Hawthorne broods over a roadway between Lenox and Stockbridge, which fashion would fain preempt with its properties and four-in-hands ; on the heights above the Hudson from Irvington to Tarrytown is a drive for which the picturesque and historic are rival claimants ; but who ever heard of the road to Shekomeko? Yet it is remarkable. From the Lake of Grace it winds through 'The Oblong" over and down the mountain. What mountain? That long ridge, variously called Win- chell, Silver Mountain, Delavern Hill, but which must inevitably be crossed to reach Shekomeko. But why go to Shekomeko? First, because on the ridge referred to, the whole range of the Catskills 205 GNADENSEE bursts in a silence-compelling view, real mountains these, where legend has stopped and lodged; second, because there are more documents about Shekomeko than the critics have discovered in the Pentateuch ; third, because around its old Indian village and Bethel, three confluent streams of civil- ization met, the Dutch, the Palatine and the Eng- Hsh; fourth, because the Moravians came here and Count Zinzendorf; fifth, because when the diaries of the missionaries, now kept in the archives of the Moravian Church, are translated we shall have a Shekomeko literature ; sixth, because Shekomeko is one of the classic loci of Christianity, like Phil- ippi, lona and Plymouth Rock; seventh, because it is a bridge over which we pass from the old world to the new, a watershed of church history, with dis- parting streams and influences. Yet, let us not be too sure in our identification. People put the ac- cent where they please in pronouncing the word and there is some latitude allowed in the spelling. Shekomeko is both a railway station, a little sleepy hamlet among the fertile hills of Duchess County, New York (we prefer to omit the "t" since the county, though settled by the Dutch, was named after the Duchess of York), and also the site of an old Indian village a few miles away. 206 SHEKOMEKO One thing is true about Shekomeko : the road to it is steep, remarkably steep in places. Horses have as hard a time as in that straggling settlement in the sands of Amagansett, Long Island, where the stage driver blows a bugle to wake the people up, and which the early settlers called Pantigo, because they had to pant and go to get through. It was on a hot, dusty August afternoon that we drove to the house of a man who knows more about Shek- omeko than any Moravian living, the curator of the monument there. From his peach orchard at Ononda Farm we could see the white shaft in a field below. It was not deemed best to visit the monument until the next morning, as it was a mile distant and the light was fading. Yet the eyes would wander that way. Why should they not? Here was the most fascinating landscape in Duch- ess County. The meadow land was rich and mel- low. In front was the long, rugged brow of Stis- sing Mountain, covered with forest as dense as when the Mohican hunters pierced its gloom. At its foot lay the Stissing chain of lakes and placid Halcyon. The associations and memories of the silent past seemed to brood over all and then fade with the white monument into the evening gloom, the Abenddunkd of the Moravian. GNADENSEE Long into the evening we talked, for the spell of the place was on us, and the genial host read from his own writings the story of a Moravian heroine. In the morning we drove down to inspect the monument. The place of the Mission House was pointed out, Zinzendorf's hut, the Indian Village, the Missionaries' Field, the Indian Brethren's Field, the "sweat-house" and other sites. It was the custom of the Moravians to gather their Indian converts into a new village, where they could be separated as much as possible from evil influences. Every mission station was thus a kind of Christian commune, with the individuality of the Moravian system — a venture whose faith was heroic, but whose existence was transient. There is in the Moravian archives an original drawing of Shekomeko, as it appeared in 1745. The most interesting spot then, as now, was the Brethren's Burying-ground. In one corner of it is the present monument and Biittner's grave. The hero of Shekomeko is Gottlob Biittner, al- though it is not the fashion of Kipling and the mod- ern school to praise such. Born in Prussia, commissioned by Count Zin- zendorf to labor among the Mohicans at Sheko- meko, crossing the Hudson, with his bride, at 208 SHEKOMEKO Rhinebeck, he labored with remarkable success. But just as things were getting into shape, a cruel persecution arose. It affected Biittner sorely and was literally an arrow in the good man's heart. We cannot here go into a detailed account of the re- peated summons, hearings, by which legally, though cruelly and most unjustly, the good man was harried and hastened to his death. It is a mat- ter of record for those who care to follow it. Biitt- ner had, for a long time, been suffering from a pul- monary complaint and the arduous journeys and repeated examinations caused by the persecution of the civil authorities, developed hemorrhages which became more frequent, until, on February 23, 1745, he left the cross on which he had been crucified and entered into rest. Like Bruce he was robed in white by Indian converts and buried among them. After resting for a hundred years in an unknown grave the present monument was erected and the "First Litany for Burials" read over the mission- ary's remains. In his Personal Narrative, Humboldt describes the pleasure he felt on discovering the Southern Cross. He says, "How often have we heard our guides exclaim in the savannahs of Venezuela, or 209 GNADENSEE in the desert extending from Lima to Truxillo, 'Midnight is past, the Cross begins to bend' ! " If the Hterary man in America is at a disadvantage because' there are no folk-lore and middle ages to fall back upon, no chanson de Roland and great Roman empire in the background, there is an ideal which is higher. When this country was settled the midnight of the world was past, the Cross had begun to bend. Not a little of this idealism was the gift of Moravian missionaries. 2IO THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PEQUOTS "Undaunted, on their foes they fiercely flew ; As fierce the dusky warriors crowd the fight ; Despair inspires ; to combat's face they glue ; With groans and shouts, they rage, unknowing flight, And close their sullen eyes, in shades of endless night. "Indulge, my native land, indulge the tear That steals, impassioned, o'er a nation's doom. To me, each twig from Adam's stock is near, And sorrows fall upon an Indian's tomb. "And, O ye chiefs ! in yonder starry home. Accept the "humble tribute of this rhyme. Your gallant deeds, in Greece or haughty Rome, By Maro sung, or Homer's harp sublime. Had charmed the world's wide round and triumphed over time." — President Dwight. THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK One day in the middle of April, 1902, a tourist found himself in a little store and post-office on the borders of the Scatacook country. Among the usual crowd of loungers was a man with marked Indian features — the high cheek-bones, straight black hair, copper skin, slender fingers and piercing black eyes revealed his lineage. He was the mail- carrier between Gaylordsville and Bull's Bridge. He said he lived on the Scatacook Reservation and would delight to act as guide for the stranger. Crossing the cataracts of the Housatonic at Bull's Bridge, here a mad, turbulent river, the west road along the river soon came to a shoulder of rock covered with hemlocks, passing which two cas- cades came tumbling down the clifif. Here, with a wooded escarpment of mountain behind and the Housatonic in front, was the Reservation. Strung along were a few unpainted, one-story houses, in 213 GNADENSEE which Hved about fifteen souls. Each house had a little patch of cultivated ground. At present there are nearly one hundred persons scattered through the state, who claim some relationship with the Scatacook tribe, but to derive any benefit from the small fund one must live on the Reservation. Long ago the wise men of the tribe, foreseeing that their name and place would disappear unless something were done, applied to the state for aid and protection. A tract of arable land along the river, with six hundred acres of rough woodland for firewood, was set off to them; but as the In- dians were not inclined to farming, the alluvial land was sold and its proceeds converted into a fund, which is administered by the courts of the state. The Reservation, therefore, has reverted to its original proprietors, the Indians and the rattle- snakes. Before ascending the mountain, the Indian in- troduced us to Rachel Mahwe, a granddaughter of Eunice Mahwe; "Aunt Eunice," as she was called in her day. She lived to the great age of one hundred and three. Rachel was ninety-three, and, but for deafness and rheumatism, seemed well and vigorous. With the Indian guide we now made the ascent 214 THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK of the wild, rocky height extending westward to the state Hne. This tract is all that now remains of what was once the hunting-grounds and corn-lands of the Scatacooks. The view from the summit was superb. The Housatonic valley, here narrowed and contracted, is laid open. Kent village lies to the north ; wild foaming rapids extend to the south where the river, chafing along its rocky gorge, is joined by the Webotuck; in front are the Litchfield Hills. Often, very often, must Indian eyes have looked ofif from this spot. Over these mountains the wild deer had been hunted and even now in winter their tracks can occasionally be seen in the snow. Stretched out on the rocks, with the wild, free air blowing over the ledges and the taciturn Indian silhouetted against the sky, there was a temptation to indulge in reverie and historic guessing. Who were the Scatacooks and whence had they come? One opinion is that they were a part of King Phil- ip's men, driven westward after the "Great Swamp Fight" by the whites, who were bent on their ex- termination. Finding security at last in the im- passable thickets and morasses of Swamp River, New York, one day when chasing the deer, as evening set in, they found themselves on the sum- 215 GNADENSEE mit of a wooded mountain. Below on the banks of a beautiful river were lands, suitable for planting corn. They called the river Housatcnuc, for they had come "over the mountain," and the corn lands Pishgachtigok, for they lay at "the confluence of two streams." There is another ethnic guess, which is that the Scatacooks were Pequots. If this be true, their ex- istence and preservation is one of the most pathetic stories in Indian annals. The Pequots were the bravest, fiercest tribe in all New England. His- torians have agreed that their destruction by the whites was an unmerited and ruthless slaughter. It reads like a chapter out of the book of Joshua, save that there was no divine command for the ex- termination. Granted that the Indian is cruel and vindictive, that he is a stranger to those manly and chivalrous sentiments which are the inheritance of the Anglo-Saxon, there is yet no evidence that the Pequots were the aggressors. The Pequots were in two forest forts, one of which was located by a force of white men, under Captains Mason and Underbill. The garrison was sound asleep. Let Mather's Magnalia describe what followed: 2i6 THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK "As they approaclied within a rod of the fort a dog bark- ing awakened another Cerberus; an Indian that stood centinel, who immediately cried out, Wannux, Wannux, i. e. English, English. However, the courageous captains presently found a way to enter the fort, and thereupon followed a bloody encounter, wherein several of the English were wounded, and many of the indians killed ; but the zvigivams or houses which filled the fort consist- ing chiefly of combustible mats we set fire to them, and presently retiring out of the fort surrounded it. The fire by the advantage of the wind carried all before it ; and such horrible confusion overwhelmed the salvages, that many of them were broiled unto death in the revenging flames; many of them climbing to the tops of the pallizadoz, were a fair mark for the mortiferous bullets there; and many of them that had the resolution to issue forth, were slain by the English that stood ready to bid 'em welcome; nor were there more than two English men that lost their lives in the heat of the action." This was in 1637, forty years before King Phil- ip's War. None of the Indians had guns. With a raging lire behind, in which their wives and childreil were roasted to death, surrounded by a merciless band of English, with guns and rapiers, the Pe- quots asked no quarter but crawled up to the pali- sades and shot their useless arrows. In an hour, from four to six hundred were burned to death; "brought down to hell," as Mather says. One hun- dred and fifty of them were warriors, the rest old men, women and children. One's sympathies are all with the Pequots. 217 GNADENSEE These "devils" and salvages were at least human beings. 'T was bad enough to have wife and chil- dren barbecued, but worse to have this relentless old Puritan write the obituary. Not a word of pity or admiration for a valor that Homer's heroes never equaled. A bear bereft of her whelps calls forth our pity. A man who dies defending his wife and children doth all that valor can. Most of the remaining- Pequots were literally hunted to death. Women and children were made slaves, some being kept in Connecticut, others sent to Massachusetts and the West Indies ; a servitude soon terminated by death. Thirty men were put "on board a vessel, which proved a Charon's ferry- boat unto them, for it was found the quickest way to feed the fishes with 'em." In the history of Guilford it is related how a Pe- quot chief with a few men were discovered. They hid at the end of the cape which juts out from the eastern side of the harbor, but Uncas, that sleuth- hound and disreputable ally of the English, was on their trail. He sent some of his men to search them out. Driven from their refuge, the Pequots swam across the harbor to be shot, as they landed, by the Mohicans. Uncas cut off the head of the Pequot chief and lodged it in the branches of an 218 THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK oak, where it hung for years. The place, to this day, is known as Sachem's Head. There was one more swamp fight near Greenfield Hill. The Pequots were betrayed and surrounded. The last picked men of the tribe, now greatly re- duced in numbers, stood at bay. The English, with their terrible guns, circled the swamp. It was death or surrender, but the Indians preferred death. All night long they crept up to the border of the swamp and shot their arrows at the English. Then in the dim gray of the morning they made their last wild dasli for freedom. There was a heavy fog and in the furious fighting some got through and escaped. What became of these survivors was never known. Their fate and destiny remains as strange as that of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. There is a tradition that they made their way to the mountains of North Carolina and when the news of King Philip's War reached them, started north to strike one more blow at the hated Eng- lish. It seems more probable that they came from the Sound up the Housatonic valley and remained here, hidden in the forests of Scatacook. For years the Indians on the Reservation used to make their journeys to the Sound and that country along the salt seashore which was the old Pequot fatherland. 219 GNADENSEE It is said that the Scatacooks are the union of two tribes. Tliat Mohicans from Shekomeko and We- quadnach came and joined them we know. Why may not the earlier and older tribe have been that Pequot remnant which escaped? The Moravians visited these Indians as early as 1742. They did what the Puritans of Connecticut failed to do, made these haughty sons of the forest docile and earnest Christians. The missionaries wrote the name of the station Pachgatgoch. We stumble at the word, but in Bethlehem it is pro- nounced as easily as Kent people say Macedonia. It is surprising how much hterature there is about this old mission in the archives of the Moravian Church. There is a rich historical field here, mate- rial for an ample volume. The Pachgatgoch mis- sion flourished long after the one at Wequadnach was abandoned. There was a strong desire to go down to the "confluence of the streams." Descending the mountain together, the guide left us at Rachel Mahwe's. In the little burial-ground, by the mur- muring Housatonic, were Indian graves, some with rude stones, others with none at all. Indian names remain for the river and the Reservation, but the Indians themselves have well-nigh perished. Only 220 THE RESERVATION AT SCATACOOK a mixed progeny remains. In that great building at the Buffalo Exposition, dedicated to those ethnic peoples who have contributed something to human progress, much importance was given to the In- dian races, but when one knows the real history there is often, as here, a pathos which cannot be told. One thing seems strange, and that is that the mission Indians of California should be so inter- esting, but the mission Indians at our very doors, a nobler, braver stock, so neglected. Perhaps some future Helen Hunt Jackson will rescue these at Scatacook from oblivion and give the world the story of the mission. Because the Indian folk-lore of New England has perished beyond recovery, every lingering le- gend has the greater value. In Northwestern Con- necticut there is a place called "Hemlock Hollow," where the snow and ice rarely melt. According to a Scatacook legend the "Hollow" was the torture ground of the spirits of bad Indians. Tlie soul of any one who died within its shadow could never escape their demon clutches. The fell spirits some- times escaped for short periods and then raised the fiercest storms. Many lives were lost here. So su- perstition lingers and is perpetuated to frighten the ignorant and enrich our literature. 221 GNADENSEE It was a pleasant ramble through the pastures and wild junipers down to the "confluence of the streams." This was the Pishgachtigok, the Scha- ticoke or Scatacook of the Indians. Here, where the rivers foamed and roared in rocky eddies and cataracts, the Indian fisherman often came with his spear. As we stood there the forest shut out all traces of civilization. It was a symphony of wa- ters, a place for imagination and dreams. But there are other dreams. The engineers who throw bridges across East River on the point of a lead pencil, are planning to build a dam at South Dover, which shall flood the valley back to Wassaic. Let those who would see Pishgachtigok visit it soon. 222 THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY "The place which the wisdom or policy of antiquity had destined for the residence of the Abyssinian princes, was a spacious valley in the kingdom of Amhara, surrounded on every side by mountains. . . . From the mountains, riv- ulets descended that filled all the valley with verdure and fertility. . . . The sides of the mountains were covered with trees, the banks of the brooks were diversified with flowers ; every blast shook spices from the rocks, and every month dropped fruits upon the ground. . . . Here the sons and daughters of Abyssinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose, attended by all tViat were skilfulto delight, and gratified with whatever the senses can enjoy. . . . To heighten their opinion of their own felicity, they were daily entertained with songs, the subject of which was the happy valley." — Rasselas. THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY The outlets of Gnadensee and Lake Webotuck join their waters in a strong, swift stream, flowing through the meadows of Sharon Valley until they empty into the Ten Mile River, or Webotuck, as the Indians called it. There seems to be some dif- ference of opinion about the etymology of this word. Trumbull says it is the same as Weep- atuck, which means the place at the narrow pass. Isaac Huntting of Pine Plains, New York, a care- ful student of Indian antiquities, insists that it comes from two words, Wccpe meaning a tooth and ing, a terminal signifying place of, hence the place of tooth mouniain, the tooth or "Peaked Mountain" being a marked feature of the country to the south of Sharon. Mr. Myron B. Benton of Leedsville, through whose beautiful farm at Troutbeck the Webotuck flews, says he once asked Eunice Mahwe, a well-known Indian woman of the Scata- 225 GNADENSEE cook tribe, what the word meant and was told, "beautiful or pleasant hunting-grounds." Whatever the etymology of the word may be, the Valley of the Webotuck is one of the fairest, greenest and most picturesque that can be found in long traveling; it is now a dairy country, with a reputation for milk and cream which the meadows of Holland and the pastures of Switzerland cannot surpass. To climb the mountains on either side and look down is to have a vision which will abide. Of course it is not the Vale of Cashmere or the "Happy Valley" of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, described in Dr. Johnson's famous classic, but this border country of New York and Connecticut should satisfy any moderate lover of the beautiful. Mountains shrouded in legend and tradition frame it in. Bright streams weave their silver braids into green meadows, trout brooks come leaping and foaming down to join them. The farmhouses are set in groves of elm and maple. Apple orchards everywhere give the landscape a color and a fra- grance beyond the hawthorns of England. On all the country roads are milk wagons drawn by the spans of the farmers. It is a land flowing with milk, yes, we may add, and honey, too. One not acquainted with the narrow margin of profit in 226 THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY farming would fain dwell here, wrapped in Elysian illusions. For lovers, it is a Sesenheim with many a charming idyl, such as Goethe found in his stu- dent days among the "blue Alsatian mountains." The few Palatinate exiles, who settled in the valley and at Amenia Union, must have been reminded of the scenery around Heidelberg and the wooded hills of the Neckar. Oblong Mountain, a long dark height rising sym- metrically above the Amenia farms, stands like the abutment of a bridge, to break and part the cur- rent. Imagination sees it emerge from geologic waters, which flowed around its base and poured down the valley. It must have been an island then, separating the waters from the waters. At Wassaic the great hills are massed. It seems as though the Commander of nature's forces had set his standard here and said, "Close up in serried ranks." From the source of the Webotuck to its junction with the Housatonic, the valley extends for up- wards of thirty miles. The "Ten Miles River" of the early settlers is therefore a misnomer. The river terraces were the corn-lands of the In- dians and maize is still the crop which they pro- duce in abundance. Here were the scattered wig- 227 GNADENSEE warns and villages, as Indian relics show. The Indian trail to the Housatonic was the present route by way of "Bog Hollow," a much more pic- turesque pass than its name implies. Let us imagine ourselves in the valley during the stone age of Indian occupation. The river terraces are treeless, but skirted by groves of gi- gantic sycamores, white oaks, ash and tulip trees. These sycamores still stand like sentinels along the river. They are the descendants of former lordly trees, the Platanus occidentalis, button-ball or water- beech. The river then was a much larger stream than now. Its waters teemed with fish. There were the beaver, the otter, the mink and the muskrat for fur. The red deer ran in droves over the moun- tains. No wonder the Indians thought their valley a foretaste of the Happy Hunting Grounds ! The Webotuck Valley might be called the valley of exile and rest. Here came the Winegars from Germantown, in 1724, a worthy Palatinate family. The invasion of the German Palatinates on the Rhine by the French in 1707 was the direct cause of the Palatine emigration, as it enforced the Revo- cation of the Edict of Nantes. There is a peculiar satisfaction that Palatinate exiles, who had experi- 228 THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY enced a double sorrow in their banishment from the German fatherland and the exactions of royal commissioners in the new world, should at last find rest and happiness in this beautiful valley. To them, as to uf, it was Amenia, the pleasant, the friendly. There were Huguenots, too, the Delamaters, rep- resenting the utmost reach of that most terrible of all expulsions, which deprived France of nearly a million of her best subjects — a loss from which the Republic still reels. A brick house, built by John Delamater in 1761, is yet standing at Leedsville. The initials "J- ^- D." can be seen on the wall. They stand for John and Mary Delamater. One thinks of other inscriptions which the Huguenots of La Rochelle cut into their houses : En attendant une meilltire. "While waiting for a better." Vaincre le mal en bien faisant Est a noire Dicu fort plaisant. "To overcome evil with good Is to our God well pleasing." This little vine-covered Huguenot home on the Webotuck is more than a landmark; it is an epic of faith. Here came also the Knickerbockers and Van 229 GNADENSEE Dusens, sturdy Dutch colonists, pushing in from the Hudson. There has been a growing interest in this old Dutch stock ever since Washington Irving turned upon them the light of his genial genius. We see them eating their rolliches of an evening, smoking then* pipes in the chimney corner and waddling their way to some little Gcreformeerde Kerche along the Tappan Zee. It is the same dauntless race that raised the siege of Leyden, drew the fangs of the Inquisition and by the exploits of De Wet and the statesmanship of Roosevelt is win- ning the praise of the world. English Puritans, another race, if possible even stronger and more influential, were pushing out from the Connecticut in hope of getting better lands. In this valley they settled. Turn now from the colonists to nature. At the southern end of the valley, near Dover Plains, are two natural wonders, which would sat- isfy even Gilbert White's demand for a suitable age in what we designate as our antiquities, since they go back of all written history and antedate the creation of man. They are the Old Stone Church and the Dover Wells. Wells and grottoes! these abound at Dover. 230 THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY As the tourist follows one of the streams which flow down from the western ridge, he comes to a rocky wall which not only bars the way but forms a grotto that is perfect and unique. No human sculptor has carved a figure into the steep rock, but the wild torrent has by erosion eaten out an entrance. It is called the Old Stone Church, since the triangular opening and spacious antrum within resemble a place of worship. The water drips down from the moist wet sides, but pours into the cave from the rear. There is the sound of many waters. On the roof ferns and trees arc growing. The chasm above and back of the church has walls which are fifty feet in height. Cascades leap down the rocks and through the hemlocks the sunbeams struggle. Not far from the "Church" are the "Wells," an- other natural wonder. Whirlpools of water, boil- ing and churning round the rock for ages, have formed deep wells, whose sides are polished as if by the lapidary's skill. There is a series of these wells. Some are so deep that one would fain be lowered into them to see the stars at noon. On asking the way to the Wells, we were told to take the railroad track half a mile south from the station, turn west by an old barn and then 231 GNADENSEE follow the roar. That is right. Below the Wells the stream purls, above them it babbles, but at the Wells it roars. The poets are usually very accurate in their al- lusions to nature. In the 'Tn Memoriam," Tenny- son speaks of "the roaring wells." Though the ex- pression there refers to the fountains of the sea, one thinks of it here at Dover. In the Isle of Wight this chasm of the Wells would be called a chine, in the West a canon, but we must adhere to such terms as defile, ravine or gorge. Often the water pours mysteriously into a well as though some mighty faucet of nature had been turned on, to rebuke the parsimony of our water companies. The fierce commercialism of American life does not take kindly to poetry. A scientific age, with railroad whistles and electric dynamos, frightens Apollo and the muses. And yet, in the telephone wires can still be heard that old music of the spheres which charmed the soul of Pythagoras. There are still those who, like the shy scholar in Gray's Elegy, "pore upon the brook that babbles by." Should this book ever fall into their hands they will, perhaps, wander down the valley and in some sylvan nook of the Dover streams on a summer's dav, read the cantos of "The Faerie Queene." THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY Do you ask for direction? Leave the village and the track, turn in by an old barn and follozv the roar. It is vision that our age needs and melody. Science and induction abound, but the scientific habit atrophies the instinct for poetry and reduces music to a computation of the calculus. Where there is no vision the people perish. The early Christians did not feed their souls on ethics, but saw on earth the descending glories of the city of God. A Swiss chalet is poetic in exterior only. The peasant within lives amid bovine smells. He loves the Ranz dcs Vachcs, but is deaf to the Bcrglicd. Tyndall found in the Alps only force and energy, but to Byron and Coleridge they were the halls and hymns of deity. The Beatific Vision of medi- eval theology is not a superstition but a faith. That we might wonder and adore, two of the evan- gelists wrought into their gospel the story of the virgin birth. The Infant of days must be eternal in the heavens. Life is not discovery, but recovery — a recovery of ideals. We need to walk the corridors of time, en- ter the aisles of old cathedrals, pause at font and altar until we are anointed with holy chrism and feel the imposition of irresistible hands. GNADENSEE Nature has her cathedrals, too, her churches of stone and wells of inspiration. No sacristan de- mands a fee. You wear the crown and ephod — for you the laurel and the sounding stars. Let us come now to a part of the valley whose history lies within the memory of living men. In the hamlet known as Sharon Valley, stands an old dilapidated building. No one would ever think of it as famous or historic. It is only a barn and place of storage at present, but on looking about the visitor will find pulleys and traces of machin- ery; shafts and ruined wheels have tumbled into the stream which once supplied the power for manufacturing. That little dilapidated building could unfold a tale about guns and projectiles which is of national and world-wide importance. Here thought and toiled the members of a family who were destined to set the name of Hotchkiss beside that of Colt, Maxim and other great Ameri- cans who have led the world in the manufacture of weapons and missiles of destruction. When the allied French and English armies were laying siege to the impregnable fortresses of the Crimea, Andrew Hotchkiss, the cripple of Sharon Valley, was saying, "I will invent a shell that will take Sebastapol." He died in 1858, but his ideas 234 THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY were carried out by his brother, Benjamin Berkley Hotchkiss, some years later. Huxley has a noted lecture on "A Piece of Chalk." One more startling, if not so interesting, might be given on a piece of shell preserved in Sharon. It is the last shell turned out at this old shop' in 1863, The works were later moved to Bridgeport and New York, the demand being too great for the home factory. This shell is a three- inch percussion. Shells were made here by A. A. Hotchkiss and Sons, for the government, from 2.6 inches to 7.5 inches in diameter. There were per- cussion shells, fuse shells and bullet shells. Their manufacture was not a business project merely, but a patriotism and a passion. Money is the sinews of war, but many a poor fellow found his sinews gone who led a dauntless charge under Stonewall Jackson and Pickett, for the story of a Hotchkiss shell is not the story of a government contract or a museum relic — it is a ghastly tale of suffering and death. The member of the family destined to win last- ' There were two shops — the one on the other side of the street and farther south was known as the Malleable Shop. Here castings were made and the heavier work done, but it was at the little old shop on the stream that the shells were finished. 235 GNADENSEE iiig fame was Benjamin Berkley Hotchkiss. He was one of the foremost artillerists of his day and the inventor of important improvements in ord- nance and the science of gunnery. It was after the Civil War, when in France, that his famous revolv- ing cannon was taken up by the French govern- ment and soon used by the principal countries of Europe and South America. This is one of the greatest inventions of our age and cannot become antiquated. It has been used on land and sea. In 1882 the firm of Hotchkiss and Company was formed, with headcjuarters in the United States and branch establishments in England, Germany, Aus- tria, Russia and Italy. Mr. Hotchkiss died in Paris, in 1885, while making further improvements on his revolving cannon, but not until a fortune of millions had been accumulated, the proceeds of which have helped many worthy charities. His widow, Mrs. Maria H. Hotchkiss, founded and en- dowed the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville and the Memorial Library in Sharon. What is that little old shop in Sharon Valley — a ruin in wood and stone, a part of some real es- tate sale? Men think so, but its ideas fought the battles of Koniggratz and Gettysburg, of Manila Bay and Santiago. 236 THE WEBOTUCK VALLEY West of Gnadensee the Webotuck flows through fertile meadows. The pastoral landscape contracts into a glen where the wind in the firs and the babble of the river blend in music. Did the road, which runs to the railway station from Sharon Valley, but follow the stream to Coleman's, Sharon village would have an ideal approach. For a cut of convenience man misses the vision of beauty ; for a road of cinders he sells the vale en- chanted. The loiterer knows the waterway and the fisherman; the farmers have kindly spared some of the firs. The name, Wequadnach Glen, is given in the hope that, in the future, many may visit it. It borders the beautiful estate of Hiddenhurst and is an easy walk from the village. 237 THE LOST BROOK AND THE FOUN- TAIN OF YOUTH "Arethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian mountains From cloud and from crag With many a jag, Shepherding her bright fountains. She leapt down the rocks With her rainbow locks Streaming among the streams : Her steps paved with green The downward ravine Which slopes to the western gleams. "Then Alpheus bold, On his glacier cold. With his trident the mountains strook ; And opened a chasm In the rocks ; — with the spasm All Erymanthus shook." — Shelley. THE LOST BROOK AND THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH The Webotuck River rises in a spring of the Riga Pass, where the mountain walls are very steep and the valley narrowed and contracted. It was in Oc- tober, that ideal weather for walking, just six months after we had followed the river to its out- let below the Reservation, that we went north, in search of its spring and that Lost Brook of which we had often heard. Along the roadside Fringed Gentian, the Gcntiana crinata of the botanists, was blooming under the "cerulean wall" and the exhib- itors of nature's tapestry had thrown their samples across the mountains, carpets of russet and brown, with crimson and scarlet figures. It has been said that the American air is like champagne. October in the Riga Pass is the time to think of the champagne country. 241 GNADENSEE Pleasant now to live together 'Neath the roof of such a weather Where sun-burnt maids in laughter call O'er some rich vintage Provencal, And purple headlands hold in fee The tuneful, hoary, classic sea. The first white men who ever came to this Pass, so far as we have any record, were the Massachu- setts and Connecticut Indian Commissioners, in August, 1694. They had conchided a treaty at Al- bany with the chiefs of the Five Nations and were now on their way home, escorted by Captain Wads- worth of Hartford, at the head of sixty dragoons. One of the company was the Rev. Benjamin Wads- worth, afterward president of Harvard College. They had been floundering through the swamps, were saddle-sore, and evidently the young doctor of theology was in no mood to appreciate the scen- ery, for at this spot he wrote in his unique journal, on our left, a hideous mountain. He also mentions a "Ten Miles river, by ye side of which we rode." This is a most valuable statement, without which we should never have known the origin of that title. The Indians called the river Webotuck and the Dutch, Mink-in-Kill. To go back a little : from the Mount Riga station a walk of a mile and a half on the railroad track 242 LOST BROOK — FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH brings the tourist to a gradient which, according to the railroad survey, is the highest point between New York and Chatham. You can see where the road-bed rises and falls away. This is the water- shed. On one side the drops fall into the Webo- tuck and find their way to the Housatonic, on the other they fall into the Roloef Jansen Kill, that watercourse mentioned so often in the old bound- aries, and reach the Hudson. Near this divide, in a farmer's field, a little east of the highway, is the Webotuck Spring. We found it bubbling under the roots of a spreading ash, at the foot of a rocky knoll. It isi a most beautiful and fascinating spot. You cannot see into the sanctities of the grotto ; the trout hide there always and only know it, but you can push a pole far in, showing the extent of the spring. We drank of this sparkling pool, at the head of that river we had now followed from source to outlet. Here was what Ponce de Leon vainly sought in the woods of Florida, the Foun- tain of Youth. Around the spring were oaks and noble trees, forming the kind of a place Euterpe and the Muses would have delighted to linger in. A governor of Connecticut once came here to drink of the water, and were the spring not so remote and better known it would have many visitors. 243 GNADENSEE Under the grand and precipitous mountains, which rise above the fertile valley, it has bubbled forth, a font of immemorial time, a fountain of Hygeia. But where was the Lost Brook? About a gun- shot away we found it. A stream comes foaming and tumbling down the mountain in a series of cas- cades, then drops into the ground and is seen no more. It has always done so. There is no deep cavern or hole, but a drop and a disappearance. The question arises, "Is not the Webotuck Spring the Lost Brook, reappearing after its journey un- derground?" Hardly. Sometimes in summer the brook runs dry, but the spring is as full as ever. Yet there must be some connection, for once when men prospecting for iron roiled the water in the brook the spring was also afifected. As one lingers here by the Lost Brook and the Webotuck Spring he inevitably thinks of Arethusa, that matchless and mysterious fountain in Sicily. According to the Greek legend, Arethusa was a beautiful nymph living in the Acroceraunian moun- tains and chased by Alpheus, the river god, who was enamored of her beauty. In her extremity and fear the nymph sent up a piteous cry to Arte- mis, then sank beneath the stream where it disap- pears in a rocky chasm. The goddess, who had 244 LOST BROOK — FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH guided her under the sea, brought her back to the light of day at this fountain near Syracuse. It was beHeved that the river Alpheus, which disappeared, ran under the sea and came up here. As one looks up at the shaggy height where the Lost Brook comes tumbling down to disappear and perhaps emerge again in the Webotuck Spring, it is not difficult to imagine a beautiful Indian girl pursued down the mountain by a too impetuous lover, and then hiding from sight in one of these underground caves. The road past the Webotuck Spring and the Lost Brook runs northward to Boston Corners. This place is a division of the earth's surface about which geography gives scant information and where history moves cautiously. At present Boston Corners is as temperate, or- derly and righteous a place as any country hamlet can be, but the one who would tell of it as it was, must relate the story of the Clan Lawless. The line between New York and Connecticut being much in dispute, an agreement was made in 1731, by which a strip one and three-quarters miles in width was ceded to New York, known as "The Oblong." This has been already referred to. The new division left Massachusetts projecting beyond 245 GNADENSEE Connecticut with a sharp corner, which was sepa- rated from the rest of the state by an impassable mountain. As it was supposed to be ruled from Boston it was dubbed Boston Corners, but it was a lawless and unmanageable corner. The sover- eignty and inaccessibility made the trouble. All sorts of lawless people came here. The Massa- chusetts sheriffs could not get over the mountains to arrest the lawbreakers ; the New York authori- ties had no rights on Massachusetts territory. A duel was fought by parties from New York City, in which one of the principals was wounded. Then came the prize-fight between"Yankee" Sullivan and John Morissey. Morissey afterwards went to Con- gress and the local wits said he began his congres- sional career at Boston Corners, by "practicing on the ayes and noes." Things became so bad that, finally, New York petitioned to have Massachu- setts' unmanageable corner set olT to her, which was done. This ended the reign of lawlessness. All modern maps have cut ofif this triangular section and lawless corner. From the highway at Boston Corners, just over the line that separates Duchess and Columbia counties, a path leads up the mountain. Few of the sojourners and residents around The 246 LOST BROOK — FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH Lake of Grace are aware that just to the north of them is one of the wildest, grandest tracts in southern New England. Small need to go to the Adirondacks, when they lie at your very door. Thus far, though, the colliers have had them pretty much to themselves. Every summer there are young men in knickerbockers who long for some- thing to do. What can be done when young Her- cules and Adonis tire of golf, femininity and this endless sitting around. By the man's soul in him let him climb. Driving is expensive ; mountain walls cannot be scaled by automobiles. There is only one elevator ; the legs must push the body up. But where is it safe and practicable to go? There are no guides at the hotels. Thank heaven they are not needed. In one brief day a climb and a tramp can be taken, whose ozone will redden the corpuscles in the blood, whose memory will reach even into life's decline. Taking the path at Boston Corners, in less than an hour young Knickerbocker will be on the mountain, if he does not punctuate the climb too often by repeating Longfellow's "Excelsior." In the zigzag path sliding heels have grained and pol- ished the old Silurian rocks. Up and out on the rocky height young Hercules will walk into the 247 GNADENSEE upper air on this wind-swept ridge-pole of New York and Connecticut. Just in front is a mountain with a cairn of stones, which every one has noticed from the car window. 'Tis Monument Mountain, and to the north is another, with the same name, ly- ing between Great Harrington and Stockbridge, which Bryant has sung into lasting fame. Dwarf blueberries and black huckleberries grow abun- dantly on Monument Mountain, even as late as October. How the mountains are tumbled! Three states have put their offerings into a contribution- box and fastened it securely over Boston Corners. Alandar, Race, The Dome, Poconnuck and Canaan Mountain have all been, thrown in, with Greylock, or Saddleback, to the north. The humps or pom- mels of the saddle can be plainly seen. To the south the high wall rises from the Webotuck valley, wrinkled and folded like a dragon, and there, flash- ing in silver beauty, is little Gnadensee, laying its sleeping head upon the dragon's awful tail. But what can Hercules and Adonis do up here? Sepa- rated from Monument Mountain by a wooded val- ley is another alluring peak. They are like Ebal and Gerizim and one can hallo across from the sum- mit in New York to the other in Massachusetts. The wireless telegraphy is the resonant air. Then 248 LOST BROOK — FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH at the flash of a kodak, as a signal agreed upon, Hercules and Adonis can descend together. If there is a little rivalry as to who shall reach the valley first, there will be headers into the bushes, torn clothes, scratches and bruised shins. Adonis descends with dignity, but Hercules is a plunger. In the old wood road in the valley is a new stone boundary, marked New York on the west side, Massachusetts on the east, and 1898 on the north side. Following the path cut out by the surveyors through the bushes about four hundred feet is an- other stone exactly like it, standing beside the old limestone marker. The latter is lettered New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. One won- ders why Connecticut is not also cut into one of the new granite shafts, but the legislature did not cooperate. If young Hercules has the wisdom of Minerva he will descend to Boston Corners as the sunset begins to gild the Catskills in the west. In his wisdom he took a pocket compass and marked the spot where the path leaves the mountain. Above all he did not tarry to get caught in a mist. In the boarding-houses and on hotel piazzas young Knickerbocker can now discourse to the unini- tiated on Hercules in Wonderland. 249 GNADENSEE There is a geography not down in the atlas. The Fountain of Youth bubbles in the Riga Pass and there is a way up the steep. That "Blue Flower," which, according to Nova- lis, is the vision of our dreams, the completion of our happiness and the pledge of our immortality, blooms here. 250 TROUTBECK "Ye sacred Muses ! witli whose beauty fired My soul is ravished and my brain inspired — Whose priest I am, whose holy fillets wear — Would you your poet's first petition hear; Give me the ways of wandering stars to know, The depth of heav'n above, and earth below : Teach me the various labors of the moon. And whence proceed the eclipses of the sun. ***♦*♦♦ "My next desire is, void of care and strife, To lead a soft, secure, inglorious life — A country cottage near a crystal flood, A winding valley, and a lofty wood." — "Georgic II," Virgil. TROUTBECK Where the Webotuck flows softly through green meadows, the valley road follows the trees and vines, crosses a bridge (here the river is loudly musical) and by an avenue of sycamores leads up to Troutbeck. The brown and gray of the build- ings, the hayricks in the fields, the stones and fences by the roadside, all blend into the landscape. Over everything is a spirit of rest, a dreamy mist of meadow, save that at times the wind blows fiercely through Bellows Gap, that pass and en- trance to Troutbeck from the west. At the summit of a long, wooded ridge Wardwell Peak looks down on the valley and the farm. In the rear of the house is a spring where the trout run up from the river and stay. You can al- ways see them^ — they dart and flash in the hot sum- mer days. This spring, with its little stream of pure, cold water, gave the name of Troutbeck to the farm. 253 GNADENSEE It is very evident that some one has lived here who loved the spot. The landscape has responded to human touch, every view point been guarded, trees have been spared, each vine coiled by an ar- tist's hand and flowers and bulbs set in beds that smile on the lawn or from the window. As you enter the house the etching of an old cathedral meets the eye, Indian relics gathered on the farm, autographs and souvenirs, but chiefly books, books on literature, forestry and history, rare books, quaint books, good books — books that have been patted as friends and loved for the souls in them. An unworldly person loves bulbs and books always. It is hard to tell what some men were meant to be. The owner of Troutbeck might have been an artist, a landscape-gardener, a literary critic or a philosopher (he could not have been a politician). Essentially he was a poet, and had he made poetry the business and not the incident of his life, hd would have ranked with those who wear the laurel. As it is he has left a name in literature, and the material for a choice volume should it ever be com- piled. He contributed to The Dial, edited by Moncure D. Conway, The Boston Commonwealth. The In- 254 TROUTBECK dependent, and The Radical. His articles in local journals, on the artistic side of farm life, the preser- vation of beauty for utility and profit, papers read before literary clubs on the antiquities of the re- gion around Troutbeck, were always events looked forward to and talked about. He was an authority on natural history, like Gilbert White of old Sel- borne — one of his favorite authors. * Here was a man who had read every word Tho- reau ever wrote and who was one of the finest Cole- ridge scholars in the country. Thoreau's last let- ter, printed in his published letters, is addressed to Mr. Benton, and among the autographs, which he had spent a lifetime in collecting, f? a letter of Coleridge's — a literary treasure now priceless. Who would think that the great philosopher and subtle poet of the Lake School would ever drop a leaf of his genius here at Troutbeck ; that one could turn in from cans and cows to Coleridge? In The Atlantic Monthly for July, 1894, is an article signed by Myron B. Benton on "Coleridge's Introduction to the Lake District." The men who can get an article into the Atlantic, that aristocrat of literary taste, that blue blood of Shawmut, have always been few, yet this article by the shy scholar of Troutbeck docs not falter or apologize. It is 255 GNADENSEE the work of a man who is sure of his ground, as sure as though he were a dalesman himself and had heard the gusts blow on Skiddavv, and yet he never crossed the ocean. It is based on the auto- graph letter and is a fine specimen of literary dis- crimination. There is a temptation to quote the chaste sentences, telling how Wordsworth and Coleridge roamed over the breezy hills that look out on the Bristol Channel, with that rare spirit of appreciation, Dorothy Wordsworth, ever near, and later among the Langdale Pikes heard echoes charm "With ropes of rock and bells of air." It was an acquaintance and friendship that aug- ured much for poetry. "Coleridge's being burst into unwonted radiance and splendor — not alas ! to en- dure, so far as poetical achievement was concerned." "A lambent flame suffused the spirit of Words- worth," but we turn from Mr. Benton's sentences and analysis to the letter itself. Coleridge is set- tled in his new home among the peaks and lakes of Cumberland. The words of "the inspired charity boy of Christ's Hospital" and whom in early man- hood the host of the Salutation and Cat offered free entertainment "only to come and talk" are al- 256 TROUTBECK ways genius-smitten. We quote the beginning and end of this letter, which is a sacred reHc at Trout- beck: "Friday, July 25, 1800. "From the leads on the housetop of Greta Hall, Kes- wick, Cumberland, at the present time in the occupancy and usufruct-possession of S. T. Coleridge, Esq., Gentle- man-poet and Philosopher in a mist. "Yes, my dear Tobin, here I am, with Skiddaw behind my back; the Lake of Bassenthwaite, with its simple and majestic case of mountains, on my right; on my left, and stretching far away into the fantastic mountains of Bor- rowdale, the Lake of Derwentwater; straight before me a whole camp of giants' tents, — or is it an ocean rushing in, in billows that, even in the serene sky, reach halfway to heaven? When I look at the feathery top of this scoun- drel pen, with which I am making desperate attempts to write, I see (in that slant direction) the sun almost set- ting, — in ten minutes it will touch the top of the crag; the vale of Keswick lies between us. . . . "I left Wordsworth yesterday ; he was tolerably well, and meditates more than his side permits him even to at- tempt. He has a bed for you ; but I absolutely stipulate that you shall be half the time at Keswick. . . . "Wordsworth remains at Grasmere till next summer (perhaps longer). His cottage is indeed in every respect so delightful a residence, the walks so dry after the long- est rains, the heath and a silky kind of fern so luxurious a bedding on every hilltop, and the whole vicinity so tossed about on those little hills at the feet of the majestic moun- tains, that he moves in an eddy; he cannot get out of it. "In the way of books, we are extraordinarily well oS for a country place. My landlord has a respectable library, full of dictionaries and useful modern things; ex. gr., the Scotch Encyclopaedia, the authors of which may the devil 257 , GNADENSEE scotch, for toothless serpents that poison with dribble! . . . "Hartly retains his love to you; he talks often about you. I hear his voice at this moment distinctly; he is be- low in the garden, shouting to some foxgloves and fern, which he has transplanted, and telling them what he will do for them if they grow like good boys ! This afternoon I sent him naked into a shallow of the river Greta; he trembled with the novelty, yet you cannot conceive his rap- tures. "God bless you ! "I remain, with affectionate esteem, "Yours sincerely, "S. T. Coleridge. "1 open the letter, and make a new fold, to tell you that I have bit the wafer into the very shape of the young moon that is just above the opposite hill." The mind of some men is an orderly series of mathemathical calculations ; the mind of others is a stream of music. The second is the poetic tem- perament. Coleridge had it and the Coleridge scholar of Troutbeck. It is the sound of many waters murmuring as they do here ; it is like the tuHp tree, a native also at Troutbeck, whose very name — liriodendron tulipifera — is a musical chord. Like the author of the Georgics, the laird of Troutbeck loved the life of the farm. He would be enrolled in the census as a farmer and considered himself honored by the name. He says, "We have hugged the soil close — an unbroken line of farm- ers: how far back in England, green and old, I do 258 , ^ TROUTBECK not know, but doubtless a long- way. This bucolic association has permeated the very blood; I feel it in every heart-beat. My intense local attachment I doubt not has been fostered through many gen- erations." Too modest to claim other distinction, and prob- ably not desiring it, his friend and occasional visi- tor at Troutbeck, John Burroughs, wrote thus of him a few years ago, in the Twentieth Century Re- view: "Planter of trees and vines, preserver of old picturesque cottages, lover of paths and streams, beautifier of highways, friend of all wild and shy things, historian and portrayor of big trees, collector of local relics, and seeker and culti- vator of all that gives flavor and character to a place, he is the practical poet of whom the country everywhere needs many more." He might be called a botanist in love. He fell on his knees before the Orchis of our northern woods and then sang about it. He knew where the delicate Dicentra could be found and the elusive inhabitants of wood and swamp. He could not be a sportsman, for, like Saint Francis of Assisi, he tamed and loved wild natures. A literary circle, of which Troutbeck was the center, included John Burroughs, Moncure D. Con- 259 GNADENSEE way, R. H. Stoddard, Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard and Joel Benton. Three Troutbeck poems have made a permanent place in literature. The first is 'The Mowers," in Bryant's anthology. Ever since Ovid wrote in the Metamorphoses about the "dura ilia messorum," those hard thighs of the reapers, the men of the scythe and sickle, have been cutting a swath in lit- erature. Mr. Benton has caught the swing exactly and found a meter for it, which he probably in- vented. You hear the ting-a-ling of the whetstone, see the mowers in the meadow, each just ahead of the other, all bending to their work and moving forward together. It is one of the few perfect poems on labor. No man could have written it who had not lived in the country and worked in a hay-field, though swinging a scythe usually raises a bUster instead of a poem. We can only quote a fragment here, unfortunately: "The sun-burnt mowers are in the swath — Swing, swing, swing! The towering lilies loath Tremble and totter and fall ; The meadow-rue Dashes its tassels of golden dew; And the keen blade sweeps o'er all — Swing, swing, swing! 260 TROUTBECK "July is just in the nick of time ! ( Hay-weather, hay-weather ; ) The mid-summer month is the golden prime For haycocks smelling of clover and thyme (Swing all together!) July is just in the nick of time!" The second poem in "Songs of Nature," edited by John Burroughs, is a "Midsummer Invitation." It begins, "O pallid student ! leave thy dim alcove And stretch one restful summer afternoon, Thoughtless amidst the thoughtless things of June, Beneath these boughs with light and murmur wove. Drop book and pen, a thrall released rove; The Sisyphean task flung off, impugn The withered Sphynx — with earth's fresh heart attune." Impugn the Sphynx is good — it sticks in the mem- ory. The last, "There is One Spot for which My Soul Will Yearn," published in the same collection, was read at the poet's funeral and makes Troutbeck now a spot haunted, by its genius loci: "There is one spot for which my soul will yearn, May it but come where breeze and sunlight play And leaves are glad, some path of swift return; A waif — a presence borne on friendly ray — Even thus, if but beneath the same blue sky ! The grazing kine not then will see me cross The pasture slope; the swallows will not shy, Nor brooding thrush : blithe bees the floweds will toss. 261 GNADENSEE Not the faint thistle down my breath may charm. Ah, me! But I shall find the dear ways old. If I have leave, that sheltered valley farm; Its climbing woods, its spring, the meadow's gold; The creek-path dearest to my boyhood's feet — O God ! is there another world so sweet?" Whether the fond wish be granted or denied, those who knew him will ever say, "This gentle spirit had no enemies; the law of kindness was in his heart and he kept the faith of things immortal." It pleases us best to think of him as at Troutbeck still. 1 262 THE ALANDAR TRAIL "Pathfinder!" "So they call me, and many a great lord has got a title that he did not half so well merit; though, if truth be said, I rather pride myself in finding my way where there is no path than in finding it where there is. But the regular troops are by no means particular, and half the time they do n't know the difiference between a trail and a path, though one is a matter for the eye, while the other is little more than a scent." — "The Pathfinder," Leather Stocking Tales. THE ALANDAR TRAIL Trail is an American word and belongs to the new world exclusively. There is something of the hunter and the woodsman left in all of us. The culture of Harvard did not obliterate it in Roose- velt and the world is glad of it. As one rides on the Harlem train north from the Lake of Grace he sees on the right a continuous mountain wall which challenges the climber to scale it. Ravines have seamed it in places, down which the cascades come leaping and foaming af- ter the heavy rains of summer. This wall is the natural rampart and bulwark of New England. Here the Berkshires end. Along this high roof are the triangulation stations of the United States Geodetic Survey. At Copake Iron Works there is a break in the wall. Through a wild and lonely gorge the Bash Bish stream comes down from Alandar. After a series of cascades and water- 265 GNADENSEE falls it takes a sheer plunge of sixty feet over the wet and slippery rocks to fall into a deep emerald pool below. These falls are 'The Staubbach" of Berkshire. Dark spruces clinging to the splin- tered crags almost catch the fleecy clouds which sail aloft. At "The Lookout" above the falls is a view which makes the head reel. Here you liter- ally look over into the mighty chasm. You are far above the tops of the tallest trees. Titans have scooped out a granite bowl whose sides are so smooth that nothing can grow upon them save some ferns and mosses. The torrent roars and thunders below and at the time of our visit the thunder of a coming storm was reverberating through the m.ountains. The road along the Bash Bish stream is one of the wildest in Berkshire. Upon it are the houses of the Berkshire Club and some old deserted farms whose buildings, black with age and neglect, are now given over to the squirrels. How different when every doorway was full of merry children! Drenching rain and sharp lightning drove us into a shed, and when the storm slackened we were glad to obtain lodging and refreshment at the Alandar Hotel. The last guest had gone, the sea- son was over, the glorious monotony and lonely grandeur of the Berkshires were settling down. THE ALANDAR TRAIL In his "Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" Thoreau says, "We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf." It was so here. On the Alandar trail we found a shipwrecked man. His wife had deserted him in the great city until it became even more lonely than this moun- tain solitude. For months his only companions had been the birds and squirrels. He seemed glad to hear the sound of a human voice and was very kind but his spirit nursed a deep revolt against the institutions of society. It is always interesting to talk with these stranded men, the flotsam and jet- sam of life's ocean, proud and fierce in their re- bellion even when they long and sue for pity. It is not as we pace the deck of an ocean liner with some agreeable compagnon de voyage but as we talk with those upon the shore that we are most profited. "I have but few companions on the shore, They scorn the strand who sail upon the sea. Yet oft I think the ocean they've sailed o'er Is deeper known upon the strand to me. "The middle sea contains no crimson dulse, Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view. Along the shore my hand is on its pulse And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew." 267 GNADENSEE The solitary was not a wreck in his own estimation ; a more exact metaphor would be a landslide like the one which can be seen now on Saddleback. He had been wrenched and loosened from his proud perch and sliding down a rocky groove, tearing his way along, lay torn and bleeding like the talus at the foot of the cliflf. And yet the landslide has its use. To the strong and daring it is a steeper and more direct way up the mountain, even as we climb over the mistakes and fragments of some wasted life. Solomon could not keep the proverbs and so he wrote them, 't is said, but we know that it was that we might hear instruction and be wise. The Taconics, like all the mountains of New England, were once covered with an ice-cap of im- mense thickness. Instead of a landsHde there was a slow movement of this mighty glacier, polishing and grooving the rocks, scooping out the lake beds, piling up the drifts of gravel, leaving the boulders of Labrador for the stone-walls of New England farms. Thousands of feet above the Taconics the ice was piled. Down the Hudson valley, here at the foot of the mountain, it slowly crept seaward. Alandar is a unique place. The post-office, schoolhouse and several boarding-houses are all that give it a name and location, unless it be the 268 THE ALANDAR TRAIL mountain which the Indians called Elk or Alandar. Who can explain the subtle fascination of a name? For years Alandar had beckoned and called, first as a mountain, then as a name. His white hood of feathery snow told when winter was nigh ; the rifts and seams on his rocky crown announced the de- parture of Boreas as the buds began to swell on the willows. In cloudy days a dusky pile, in the amber air of October a flush of brown and red, he had all the moods and witchery of a coquette. The years had pas.'ied like those in which Jacob sued and toiled for Rachel, and should we be disappoint- ed now? The walking-sticks of other climbers stood in the rack at the hotel but it was four long miles to the summit, and far into the night the storm roared, drenching all the trees and bushes. The morning broke fresh and breezy over Alan- dar. "Loud is the vale ! the voice is up With which she speaks when storms are gone, A mighty unison of streams ! Of all her voices, one !" Down in the meadow the swollen trout brook was hurrying on to join the roaring torrent in the gorge. It was a morning when everything moved. The time had come to "follow the gleam" and over- 269 GNADENSEE take it. A boy led the way through the rain- drenched forest, climbed warily over a wrecked and tottering bridge, piloted us to a shanty once used by wood-choppers and then turned back. Beyond this he had never been. He said, furthermore, that there were rattlesnakes on the mountain. P'or a long distance the overgrown trail led on, coming out at last into a narrow path marked by blazes on the trees. The steeper ascent, the stunted timber, the clearer light gleaming through the forest told us that now we were on the mountain. Emerging from the scrub we clambered up over the rocks to the summit. Mountain cranberries, the Vitis Idaea, were growing, and in the rock, firmly braced, the Geodetic Survey had erected a flagstaff from which a white flag was flapping in token of surren- der. Alandar was a ''hands-upper" as the Boers say. Cortez "silent on a peak of Darien." The soul is mute and speechless or uses the language of exclamation when on a new mountain. Prone on the rocks, or standing faced against the wild, free wind, the eye surveyed its aerial domain. First there was the township of Mount Washington. Located in the extreme southwestern corner of Mas- sachusetts, this elevated plateau lies between The 270 THE ALANDAR TRAIL Dome on the east and Alandar on the west. One mountain looks down on the Housatonic, the other on the Hudson. To the north is a gorge through which Bash Bish, "daughter of rough old Taconic" escapes from her mountain prison, a place where the monks miglit have built their Grande Chartreuse or the Preraphaelites founded a colony. On Alandar the archaic rocks were lichen lined and a light carpet of grass covered the ledges. The west wind was blowing the cloud-rack of yesterday down the empyrean. What a spot to be buried in ! Moses was buried by the angels on Nebo. He who so often went up into the Mount to talk with God must lie in state near that high world from which the spirits fly on wings of light to this far orb. How intimately associated the mountains are with Christ's life on earth! It was from an exceeding high mountain that the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. From the Horns of Hattin Jesus pronounced those Beatitudes which are as the dew in mountain pastures and which come sounding down our noon of time like voices of the morning. We read that he went up into a mountain to pray. It was on Hermcm that his glory burst forth. It was from Olivet' that he ascended when his work was done 271 GNADENSEE and it is mysteriously said in prophecy that "his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east." On Alandar one felt that old veneration for high places which is a universal instinct of the race. From the earliest times it was the custom to erect altars on some lofty and conspicuous spot. The worshipers were thus brought near to heaven. Like all innocent impulses, this one in time became perverted until the worship in the "high places" was only a form of degrading idolatry. When uncorrupted by vicious indulgence and when freed from human sacrifice there is some- thing beautiful in these old superstitions. The Aryan priests of our ancestors, in the home land on the high plateaus of central Asia, would climb the mountains at dawn to worship the sun. God's glory smote them in the face and who shall say there did not come hints and gleams of truth, that religious truth which is the primal instinct and in- heritance of the race? Even now the Guebers and Parsees keep up this old Zoroastrian cult. These mountains have had a most interesting his- tory. They are a branch or continuation of the Green Mountains of Vermont and in geology are known as the Taconic System. The rocks belong 272 THE ALANDAR TRAIL to the Lower Silurian age. This means that at one time they were an old sea beach. Silurian rocks are widely spread over the globe, but these of the Taconic System are more or less meta- morphosed. By chemical changes and a rear- rangement of the constituents they have become hard and crystalline. Great forces, dynamic agen- cies whose nature we do not know, have raised and tilted those old sea-bottoms so that walking on the mountains your feet are planted in the sea. The limestones overlap and come to the surface, and up through the strata from the hot bowels of the earth the iron ores have been forced which abound in all this region. What ages rolled on in vast eonian times before man appeared ! How little we know of how the earth was formed or of the men who lived upon it ! They have left some names like Ta- conic and Alandar, but a dead savagery or civiliza- tion has a tale of pathos always ; it crouches and cowers in the fierce light of modern civilization ; there is that ever-present lament, " I was but I am not." And we may pass. This mountain wall, the outer rampart and bulwark of New England, may at some day train its cannon on all that we hold dear, and better, stronger men take our degenerate place. But the mountains will remain. The Ta- 273 GNADENSEE conies will catch the early dawn as it comes up over the eastern sea and behold the flaming ban- ners of the dying day as they go down behind the Catskills. And if the Taconics crumble and disap- pear, God will be, for "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlast- ing thou art God" — scccula sccadorum, the Ohms of time, the cons of eternity. The inhabitants of Alandar, true to their New England instinct, take a just pride in their little church and schoolhouse. The latter was a model of neatness, order and beauty. The old homes and families may disappear, but the fires of education and religion are still kept burning on the moun- tains. At the base of Alandar and The Dome the trailing arbutus, Epigcea rcpcns, is abundant, also the pennyroyal. One of the boarding-houses is called the Pennyroyal Arms Inn. It might, with equal propriety, be called Arbutus Lodge. The way out from Alandar was by the mountain road and down through Sage's Ravine. It is such a place as the Dutch would call Clove-Kill, for a mighty chasm has been cleft or cloven. In some ways the ravine reminds one of the Lynn stream which ascends to the Doone Valley, only there the 274 J. R. Jordan, Lakcville. Sage's Ravine THE ALANDAR TRAIL gold of the gorse and the purple heather have their scents blown through the air by the sea wind. There is the open moorland and the rich, deep green of the combes. This stream over back of Bear Mountain is fully as wild, but there is a for- est sanctity and a suggestion of something pri- meval, which one never Jinds in England. Genera- tions of civilized people have not intercepted the delivery of nature's wares. One comes to the final cause of things ; there is a virgin freshness and charm. On the grass and heather of British heights your true American always longs for the forest and the mountain streams. He may pluck the heather, but he misses the blazed trail. From Bash Bish to Alandar and out by the Ra- vine had been a two days' tramp and a hard one. Often, in the forest roads, a speechless pause was made to behold the purple hills, rising or dipping down as the horizon changed. The traveler had climbed to Eagle's Nests, looked over dizzy heights, followed trackless streams, crossed the watershed of the Hudson and the Housatonic, as- cended a mountain and lingered before the wildest waterfalls in Berkshire. Poor Christopher North! the time came when he could no longer ramble over the moors and visit 275 GNADENSEE the lochs of his beloved Scotland. The gun and the fishing-rod were laid aside forever. He who had the strength and sinews of a Norseman became as helpless as a little child. Had the great nature lover and author of the Nodes AmbrosiarKr fol- lowed the Alandar trail he would have added an- other chapter to his book and found a solace for those evil days. 276 THE LAKE COUNTRY OF CON- NECTICUT "Soon after leaving Norfolk we came in sight of the Ta- conic range, a high and picturesque ridge forming the west- ern boundary of the Housatonic valley. The sun had al- ready declined, and this chain of dome-like hills was clothed in a garment of intense and exquisite blue, which hid every detail of mountain structure and exhibited the range as a silhouette of indigo upon a background of prim- rose sky. Behind the clear-obscure and enchanting pro- file of the hills, the misty peaks of the distant Catskills rose in the evening air, reminding us that between their shad- owy slopes and the blue Taconics, the mighty Hudson was sliding to the sea, freighted with the commerce of half a continent. . . The railroad follows the course of this stream (the Blackberry River), keeping, as usual, upon a terrace of drift. Thence the eye wanders down to the sheltered bottoms, where a line of pale green willows, skirting the stream, announces the lagging spring." — Old-World Ques- tions and New-World Answers. THE LAKE COUNTRY OF CONNECTICUT No New Eng-lander ever looks back from his dinner on Thanksgiving Day without seeing lakes somewhere — his own name for them is ponds. It makes no difference whether he is a Highlander or a Lowlander, comes from the cloud-capped granite hills or the loud resounding sea, your true Yankee has some grains of granite in his constitution, scents the east wind as his native air and always sees a lake somewhere. Old England has its Lake Country, but all New England is one. In Plym- outh, Massachusetts, the inhabitants say they have a pond for every day in the year. They are so pure and transparent that, next to the broad Atlantic by his Marshfield home, nothing delighted the soul of Webster so much as a visit to these Plymouth Ponds. Cape Cod, with its long Hne of sand dunes pounded by the eternal surf, is covered with ponds from bay to ocean side. 'Tis even more so in 279 GNADENSEE Maine. One can launch his canoe at Moosehead, and go north from lake to lake through a hundred miles of hunting country. He will find in that for- est wilderness "many a gem of purest ray serene," with long, unpronounceable Indian name, which far surpasses Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine. Connecticut, too, has its Lake Country. God sank his ores beneath the bases of the hills, but left his gems upon the surface. The Lake Country properly includes the Twin Lakes of Salis- bury, the Riga lakes, the Lakeville and Sharon Ponds, Lake Waramaug whose shores resemble the Highlands of the Hudson, Highland Lake at Winsted, Bantam Lake near Litchfield, and many others, but the Lake Country referred to here is that included within the townships of Salisbury and Sharon and lying west of the Housatonic river. Starting at the Twin Lakes one can dip down in a chain of them to Gnadensee or at Riga Lake have boating on the top of a mountain. The scenery around the Twin Lakes is like that of Cumberland and Westmoreland. As one looks up at The Dome, which here rises abruptly, there is a striking parallel to Skiddaw and Derwentwater. 280 LAKE COUNTRY OF CONNECTICUT The view from a point on the railroad is always a point of exclamation. The names M'^'ashining and Washinee are not the aboriginal designations though more easy to pro- nounce. The popular etymology is pleasant if not accurate. One is "Smihng" and the other "Laugh- ing Water." The difference of a syllable makes the difference between a smile and a laugh, and it is remarkable that when one lake is in ripple the other is placid. There is a legend that long before the white man came, Washining and Washinee were the twin daughters of an old chief who claimed all the land between the Housatonic and the Hudson and ruled his people with a rod of iron. His daughters were so fair that suitors came from every tribe, but none found favor. At last a hostile tribe made war on the old chief. The invaders were beaten off, but their leader, a handsome young brave, was captured and condemned to death by torture. While he was a prisoner each sister, without any knowledge of the other's thoughts, fell in love with him. Se- cretly they brought him food, and nursed him. Wildly but vainly they begged their father to set him free. One day in great sorrow they confessed each to the other this secret love. Finally the time 281 GNADENSEE came for the torture, but that they might not behold it, on the last night, just as the moon was rising above the trees, they paddled out on the lake in their little canoe. Clasped in each other's arms they sprang into the water and disappeared for- ever. Long the Indians fancied that in the moon- light on Washining and then on Washinee they saw a canoe floating empty and alone. As they looked it would, disappear, and then over the water came that mad laughter and mockery, the Ha-ha-ha! Jia-ha-ha! of the loons. The daughters left their names, which the lakes bear to this day. All this region around the Twin Lakes is haunt- ed by the great soul of Beecher. He loved to drift over the limpid waters and follow the trout streams. For him the mountains had their aisles of gloom and sailing continents of vapor. The finest chapters in the Star Papers are the record and impressions of his summers here. He never detached the ten- drils of his heart from Salisbury. His friend Adam Reid, the eloquent Scotch di- vine, also left here an enduring fame. He was an elect fisherman and used the fly, one of the five points of his Calvinism being that "any fule can catch a fish ivith a wurrnm." 282 15 H a W H O w O d" K LAKE COUNTRY OF CONNECTICUT Only a great soul can appreciate nature. He must believe that back of beauty and cosmic force there is an unfettered, infinite, personal Spirit — not only believe it but love to have it so. If the universe be only an eternal rhythm and dissonance which has in itself the power to create what appears but is not itself created, then half its beauty and charm are gone. The highest that we know is spirit. Nature is but the robe and outer court of deity. The Word spake and cosmos rose, natura grew, not self-evolved but subject to spirit. The Riga Lakes are an Adirondack idyl. As one rows out among their rocky islets or follows the sinuous reaches of wooded shore it is like being set down in some archaic and primeval world. God is present, not man, but it is God in being and ex- istence only, the I AM of the burning bush. These lakes are such as Thoreau would have loved, that strange genius who does not describe a rock or tree but becomes one. If one wants the human touch, the grassy slope, the children playing on the shore, blue waters smiling in beauty, the Riga lakes will not attract, but if he wishes to see the world as God created and then left it, he will visit them. The Lakeville Ponds are a second pair of twins which eventually send their waters into the Housa- 283 GNADENSEE tonic. There is a watershed between them, so that they do not connect. The larger is Wononscopomuc, a lake without reedy shores and resembling the fa- mous "Stockbridge Bowl." It is the lake of edu- cational institutions with its Hotchkiss and Taconic Schools; its waves break to the music of Homeric cadences. There is a beautiful drive around it and the Interlaken Road leads past the buildings of the Hotchkiss School. Few institutions have such a commanding site, whose northern vista opens through the gates of Berkshire. Here in the family lot, looking down on the lake, close to the school she founded, Mrs. Hotchkiss was laid to rest in a chih November day of 1901, the casket being borne through lines of students and professors standing with uncovered heads. Not far away is the Montgomery House of Revo- lutionary fame, where two British officers, a wound- ed Captain Montgomery and his surgeon, prisoners on parole, were entertained and cared for by the Livingstons who had fled from their Manor of Clermont on the Hudson. It is a great pity that this old mansion was ever allowed to fall into decay, for it was a fine specimen of Colonial architecture. The Interlaken Road leads past Wononpakook or Long Pond as it is commonly called. One must 284 LAKE COUNTRY OF CONNECTICUT drive in through private grounds, however, to get near the lake, which is shy and jealous of its beauty. If less academic than Wononscopomuc it is preferred by campers, who pitch their tents in the pines on the eastern shore. The Sharon Ponds are on opposite sides of In- dian Mountain, as we were told in the opening chap- ter of this book. Many wish that the one known as Mudge could change its name. There is a fringe of willows on its western shore and in lieu of the endless crystal or silver lakes Willowmere would be a relief. The willow is the tree for lakes and water- courses the world over. Ever since Jewish exiles hung their harps on the tamarisks by the Euphrates the willow has been the tree of exile and pathos. Do they not weep for that lost race whose wig- wams once formed a village at the outlet? We have persistently called the lake Webotuck, since it flows into that river. For what noted? Must every sheet of water be famous, as though beauty were not its own excuse for being? But Webotuck has its own modest fame. Dragging their cannon up its western slope, the artillerists of Sharon Valley often fired across the lake in mimic war, their trajectory being pro- phetic of war that was real. Strange juxtaposition, 285 GNADENSEE that Moravians who would not fight and men en- gaged in the manufacture of deadly missiles should both come here! Will some antiquarian, hundreds of years hence, digging out the shells on the eastern shore of the lake, write learnedly about the battle that must have been fought there, find traces of men in the iron age, or will some Moravian millen- nium then have dawned, when the nations shall learn war no more? There is no need to speak of Gnadensee when so much of this book has been written about it. The name as interpreted by its Moravian history in- duces a mood holier than any dream of beauty, though grace and beauty are but sides of a comple- mental unity. As one drives by this Moravian strand which holy men knew and loved, Gnadensee seems like Gcnnesaret of old, a lake apart. Its beauty cannot be told by reason of a glory which excelleth. 286 ECHOES AND RIPPLES "Beautiful Sharon ! If you have been there you may pos- sibly say that my language is too strong. Topographically it is not more exquisite in situation or outlook than a doz- en other New England villages, but to me, it is the fairest spot on the globe. When I go to heaven I hope to begin the journey from Sharon. There is a central avenue a mile long and something over two hundred feet wide. On either side are stately elms, whose branches interlace, giving a picturesqueness to the place which it would be difficult to duplicate. These elms have looked down on two or three generations of men v^ho have done their day's work and then gone to the churchyard at the end of the village. . . . The drives about Sharon are exceptionally fine. During the first week of my stay I explored the surrounding coun- try, sometimes on foot and then again on horseback. From every hilltop I had a new view, the landscape being varied by plains, rivers, and lakes, all framed by ranges of moun- tains along the horizon line. . . . When you know all you will understand why Sharon is like paradise; and why I am building a cottage there on a hilltop just outside the village limits." — "Brown Studies," George H. Hepivorlh. ECHOES AND RIPPLES The mountain by The Lake of Grace has been cHmbed for the sunset. Down through the thick woods and over the steep ledges the cHmber has sHd into the green pastures by its shining levels. The twilight falls. Tliere is only the faintest pos- sible ripple on the water. The cow-bells tinkle in the meadow and the water gnats are flitting about on the surface of the lake. 'T is the hour for reflection and reverie, the echoes and ripples of that olden time whose memories are our sweetest dreams. Pale forms of the past crowd and hover on the shore. Above the torpor of ilHmitable woods rises the war-whoop of the savage. The daring hunter comes that he may find pelt for those patroons and lords of the manor whose great feudal estates stretched from the Hudson nearly to the Lake of Grace. What high-souled men lived in those old days ! what courtesy and pride of life ! The cannon at the entrance to their manors 289 GNADENSEE was fired upon the birth or death of one in the fam- ily. Grandes dames on gala days appeared stifi and elegant in their brocades and satins. Their love letters are signed Portia and Diana ; their husbands sit in Colonial Assemblies. Then saintly souls thread the forest paths, and Zinzendorf's daughter and Cammerhof come from the blue Saxon mountains over the sea and from Bethlehem, to tell the story of the Cross and hu- man brotherhood to Mohican savages. A pale young Scotchman is catechizing his Indian con- verts and preparing them for their first sacrament. His body is wasted by fever and he hastens to complete his work ere the end. Then out from the shore Indian canoes paddle noiselessly and bear his body robed in white over the pallid waters to its burial under the sighing pines. A weary Pala- tine next appears, starved and oppressed by the very charity that brought him here, the saddest of all our exiles save the Huguenot. The descendants of English Puritans are now seen pouring over the Litchfield Hills, a serious race, doubting not they are the very elect of God, men who have made their mountain county justly famous by the splendid roll of great names they have given to the country. 290 ECHOES AND RIPPLES A wonderful voice is heard on Sharon Street. 'T is Whitefield's, calling on sinners to repent, and those marvelous tones are borne almost to the Lake of Grace. And now the war drum rolls. The Sharon men have heard the echo of those minute guns at Lex- ington and the "Old Continentals" are lining up on the Green, young men then, all of them. There is one whose name was Maxam. He was at Crown Point and Isle au Noix ; with Ethan Allen he tried to capture Montreal, was taken captive, ironed, put on board a prison ship, sent back and forth across the Atlantic, escaped in New York, made his way back to his native town, enlisted again, was at Valley Forge and Monmouth and White Plains, fought under Washington, Lafayette, Baron Steu- ben and Lee. He ought to have been one of Wash- ington's Life Guard and had a monument, but the old man had to appear in Litchfield Courthouse in 1832 and plead for a pension. The songs of Hessian troopers are heard. It is Luther's Hymn, "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott." It rolls along the valley of the Webotuck; the mountains echo it again. Burgoyne's surrendered men are marched through these western towns. In their hearts they never loved George the Third 291 GNADENSEE and they could not have hated George the Good; rough fellows ready to plunder patriot or Tory alike, quite ready to desert, marry and raise up sons who swear by no Fatherland but America. The nascent years roll on. Here by The Lake of Grace the trombones of Bethlehem are heard, and that holy Moravian Litany which has pealed its stately words from the frozen shores of Greenland to the hot lands under the equator, read and chanted now over the graves of Bruce and Powell. There are other echoes and voices. The "weak piping time of peace" is over. The screech of a Hotchkiss shell tears the summer air over old Poconnuck and on many a battle-field and "Bloody Angle" where the battalions of Lee are massed, tears its gory way through dead and mangled men. Every May the eye has a mist of tears as garlands are placed at bugle calls on the graves of those who are mar- shaled on the mystic plains. The twilight fades into a deeper gloom ; on the village street the bells in the churches are tolling the death of McKinley. A bright star rises over Gnadensee. It is Herrnhut, "The Watch of the Lord." As several views in the Lake Country which appear in different chapters of this book were taken expressly for it, the author would acknowledge his indebtedness to F. N. Kneeland of Northampton, Massachusetts, whose book on Northampton, The Meadow City, is a beautiful specimen of photographic art. JUN 4 1903 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 014 076 267 2