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1Author:  Thompson Daniel P. (Daniel Pierce) 1795-1868Add
 Title:  May Martin, or, The money diggers  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: In one of those rough and secluded towns, situated in the heart of the Green Mountains, is a picturesque little valley, containing, perhaps, something over two thousand acres of improvable land, formerly known in that section of the country by the appallation of The Harwood Settlement, so called from the name of the original proprietor of the valley. As if formed by some giant hand, literally scooping out the solid mountain and moulding it into shape and proportion, the whole valley presents the exact resemblance of an oval basin whose sides are composed of a continuous ridge of lofty hills bordering it around, and broken only by two narrow outlets at its northerly and southerly extremities. The eastern part of this valley is covered by one of those transparent ponds, which are so beautifully characteristic of Vermontane scenery, laying in the form of a crescent, and extending along beneath the closely encircling mountains on the east nearly the whole length of the interior landscape, forever mirroring up from its darkly bright surface, faintly or vividly, as cloud or sunshine may prevail, the motley groups of the sombre forest, where the more slender and softer tinted beech and maple seem struggling for a place among the rough and shaggy forms of the sturdy hemlock, peering head over head, up the steeply ascending cliffs of the woody precipice. While here and there, at distant intervals, towering high over all, stands the princely pine, waving its majestic head in solitary grandeur, a striking but melancholy type of the aboriginal A* Indian still occasionally found lingering among us, the only remaining representative of a once powerful race, which have receded before the march of civilized men, now destined no more to flourish the lords of the plain and the mountain. This pond discharges its surplus waters at its southern extremity in a pure stream of considerable size, which here, as if in wild glee at its escape from the embrace of its parent waters, leaps at once, from a state of the most unruffled tranquility, over a ledgy barrier, and, with noisy reverberations, goes bounding along from cliff to cliff, in a series of romantic cascades, down a deep ravine, till the lessening echoes are lost in the sinuosities of the outlet of the valley. From the western shore of this sheet of water the land rises in gentle undulations, and with a gradual ascent, back to the foot of the mountains, which here, as on every other side, rear their ever-green summits to the clouds, standing around this vast fortress of nature as huge centinels posted along the lofty outworks to battle with the careering hurricanes that burst in fury on their immovable sides, and arrest and receive on their own unscathed heads the shafts of the lightning descending for its victims to the valley below, while they cheerily bandy from side to side the voicy echoes of the thunderpeal with their mighty brethren of the opposite rampart.
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