CHAPTER I. The traveller who at the present day is content to travel in the goodold Asiatic style, neither rushed along by a locomotive, nor dragged bya stage-coach; who is willing to enjoy hospitalities at far-scatteredfarmhouses, instead of paying his bill at an inn; who is not to befrightened by any amount of loneliness, or to be deterred by theroughest roads or the highest hills; such a traveller in the easternpart of Berkshire, Massachusetts, will find ample food for poeticreflection in the singular scenery of a country, which, owing to theruggedness of the soil and its lying out of the track of all publicconveyances, remains almost as unknown to the general tourist as theinterior of Bohemia.
Travelling northward from the township of Otis, the road leads fortwenty or thirty miles towards Windsor, lengthwise upon that long brokenspur of heights which the Green Mountains of Vermont send intoMassachusetts. For nearly the whole of the distance, you have thecontinual sensation of being upon some terrace in the moon. The feelingof the plain or the valley is never yours; scarcely the feeling of theearth. Unless by a sudden precipitation of the road you find yourselfplunging into some gorge, you pass on, and on, and on, upon the crestsor slopes of pastoral mountains, while far below, mapped out in itsbeauty, the valley of the Housatonie lies endlessly along at your feet.Often, as your horse gaining some lofty level tract, flat as a table,trots gayly over the almost deserted and sodded road, and your admiringeye sweeps the broad landscape beneath, you seem to be Bootes driving inheaven. Save a potato field here and there, at long intervals, the wholecountry is either in wood or pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep are theprincipal inhabitants of these mountains. But all through the year lazycolumns of smoke, rising from the depths of the forest, proclaim thepresence of that half-outlaw, the charcoal-burner; while in early springadded curls of vapor show that the maple sugar-boiler is also at work.But as for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of it here.At any rate, no man by that means accumulates a fortune from this thinand rocky soil, all whose arable parts have long since been nearlyexhausted.
Yet during the first settlement of the country, the region was notunproductive. Here it was that the original settlers came, acting uponthe principle well known to have regulated their choice of site, namely,the high land in preference to the low, as less subject to theunwholesome miasmas generated by breaking into the rich valleys andalluvial bottoms of primeval regions. By degrees, however, they quittedthe safety of this sterile elevation, to brave the dangers of richerthough lower fields. So that, at the present day, some of those mountaintownships present an aspect of singular abandonment. Though they havenever known aught but peace and health, they, in one lesser aspect atleast, look like countries depopulated by plague and war. Every mile ortwo a house is passed untenanted. The strength of the frame-work ofthese ancient buildings enables them long to resist the encroachments ofdecay. Spotted gray and green with the weather-stain, their timbers seemto have lapsed back into their woodland original, forming part now ofthe general picturesqueness of the natural scene. They are ofextraordinary size, compared with modern farmhouses. One peculiarfeature is the immense chimney, of light gray stone, perforating themiddle of the roof like a tower.
On all sides are seen the tokens of ancient industry. As stone aboundsthroughout these mountains, that material was, for fences, as ready tothe hand as wood, besides being much more durable. Consequently thelandscape is intersected in all directions with walls of uncommonneatness and
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