University of Virginia Library

1. THE
HAWKS OF HAWK-HOLLOW.

1. CHAPTER I.

America is especially the land of change. From
the moment of discovery, its history has been a
record of convulsions, such as necessarily attend
a transition from barbarism to civilization; and to
the end of time, it will witness those revolutions in
society, which arise in a community unshackled
by the restraints of prerogative. As no law of
primogeniture can ever entail the distinctions meritoriously
won, or the wealth painfully amassed, by
a single individual, upon a line of descendants, the
mutations in the condition of families will be perpetual.
The Dives of to-day will be the Diogenes
of to-morrow; and the `man of the tub' will often
live to see his children change place with those of
the palace-builder. As it has been, so will it be,—

and the honoured and admired of one generation
will be forgotten among the moth-lived luminaries
of the next.

That American labours under a melancholy infatuation,
who hopes, in the persons of his progeny,
to preserve the state and consideration he has acquired
for himself. He cannot bequeath, along
with lands and houses, the wisdom and good
fortune which obtained them; nor can he devise
preventives against the natural consequences of
folly and waste. His edifice of pride must crumble
to dust, when both corner-stone and hypogeum
are based upon the contingencies of expectation;
and the funeral-stone and the elm of his family
mausoleum will vanish, in course of time, before
the axe and plough of a new proprietor.

This is the ordinance of Nature, who, if she
scatters her good gifts of talents with a somewhat
despotic capriciousness, is well content that
men should employ them in republican and equal
rivalry.

In a little valley bordering upon the Delaware,
there stood, fifty years since, a fair dwelling, within
an ample domain, which a few years of vicissitude
had seen transferred from its founder to a stranger,
although wealth and a family of seven sons, the
boldest and strongest in the land, might have seemed
to insure its possession to them during at least
two generations. The vale lies upon the right bank
of the river, imbosomed among those swelling hills
that skirt the south-eastern foot of the Alleghanies,
(using that term in the broad, generic sense given
it by geographers,) the principal ridge of which,—
the Ka-katch-la-na-min, or Kittatinny, or as it is
commonly called, the Blue Mountain,—is so near
at hand, that, upon a clear day, the eye can count
the pines bristling over its gray and hazy crags.
It stretches, indeed, like some military rampart of
the Titans, from the right hand to the left, farther

than the eye can reach, broken only by the gaps
that, for the most part, give passage to rivers; and
but for these, it would be entirely impassable.

The original proprietor of the estate was an
English emigrant of humble degree, and, at first, of
painfully contracted circumstances; but having
fallen heir to a considerable property in his own
land, and events of a very peculiar nature altering
the resolution he had formed to enjoy it within the
limits of the chalk-cliffs of Albin, he sat himself
down in good earnest to improve the windfall at
home. The little farm which he had cultivated
with his own hands, was speedily swelled into an
extensive manor; and deserting the hovel of logs
which had first contented his wants, he built a
dwelling-house of stone, so spacious, and of a
style of structure so irregular and fantastic, that
it had, at a distance, the air rather of a hamlet
than a single villa, and indeed looked not
unlike a nest of dove-cots stuck together on the
hill-side. Without possessing one single feature of
architectural elegance, it had yet a romantic appearance,
derived in part from the scenery around,
from the beauty of the groves and clumps of trees
that environed it, and the vines and trailing flowers
that were made, in summer at least, to conceal
many of its deformities. It was exceedingly sequestered
also; for except the log hovel, into which
Mr. Gilbert (for that was his name) had inducted
a poor widow, befriended out of gratitude for
kindness shown him, when their respective conditions
were not so unequal, there was not another
habitation to be seen from his house, though it
commanded an extensive prospect even beyond the
river. The highway to the neighbouring Water-Gap,
indeed, ran through the estate; the broad
river below often echoed to the cries of boatmen
and raftsmen, floating merrily onward to their

market; and the village dignified with the title of
County-town, was not above seven or eight miles
distant; so that the valley was not always invested
with a Sabbath-day silence; and, besides, his
protegée, the widow, had, with Mr. Gilbert's consent,
converted her hovel into a house of entertainment,
which sometimes seduced a wayfarer to
sojourn for a period in the valley. Mr. Gilbert
himself did all he could to add life and bustle to
his possessions, by doing honour to such well behaved
villagers, or even strangers, as he could
induce to ruralize with him; for having built and
planted, and torn down and transplanted, until he
knew not well what to do with himself, he hit upon
that expedient for driving away ennui which passes
for hospitality,—namely, converting into guests
all proper, and indeed improper, persons from
whom he could derive amusement, and who could
assist him to kill time. To this shift he was driven,
in great part, by the undomestic character of his
children; who, so soon as they arrived at an age
for handling the rifle, individually and infallibly
ran off into the woods, until, as the passion for
hunting grew with their growth, they might be
said almost to live in them. It was this wild propensity,
acting upon a disposition unusually self-willed
and inflexible, in the case of his eldest boy,
Oran, that defeated his scheme of spending the
remainder of his days in England. He actually
crossed the sea, with his whole family, and remained
in the neighbourhood of Bristol, his native
town, for the space of a year; but in that time,
Oran, a boy only twelve years old, `heartily
sick,' as he said, `of a land where there were no
woods, and no place where he could get by himself,'
finding remonstrance and entreaty fail to
move his father's heart to his purpose, took the
desperate resolution of returning to America alone;
which he did, having concealed himself in the
hold of a vessel, until she was out of the Channel.
His sufferings were great, but he endured them
with incredible fortitude; and finally after many
remarkable adventures, he found himself again in
his happy valley, in the charge or protection, if it
could be so called, of the good widow Bell,—for
that was the name of the poor woman befriended
by his father. In a few months, his father followed
him, perhaps instigated by affection, (for Oran,
being the worst, was therefore the most favoured
of his children,) by the murmurs of the others, or
by the discovery he undoubtedly made, that his
wealth would secure him, if not equal comfort, at
least superior consideration, in the New World.

Consideration indeed he obtained, and increase
of wealth; but the wild manners and habits of his
children greatly afflicted him; and having married
a second wife, he was induced, in the hope of
`making a gentleman,' as he called it, of the boy
she bore him, (none of the others having that ambition,)
to commit him to the protection of a sister,
the widow of a Jamaica planter, who had
divided with him the bequest that had made his
fortune, and being childless herself, desired to
adopt him as her heir.

Thus much of the early history of Mr. Gilbert
was recollected with certainty, so late as the year
1782, by the villagers of Hillborough, the countytown
already mentioned, who had so often shared
his hospitality; but long before that time, he had
vanished, with all his family, from the quiet, beautiful,
and well-beloved valley. They were wont
to speak with satisfaction of the good dinners they
had eaten, the rare wines they had drunk, the
merry frolics they had shared, in the Hawk's
Hollow,—for so they perversely insisted upon
calling what Mr. Gilbert, in right of possession,

chose to designate as Avon-dale, in memory, or in
honour of his own buxom river of Somerset; they
related, too, to youthful listeners, the prophetic sagacity
with which they had predicted violent ends
to the young Hawks of Hawk-Hollow, (so they
called the young Gilberts,) for their disobedience
to father and mother, and their unusual passion for
a life of adventure; and, finally, they shook their
heads with suspicion and regret, when they spoke
of Jessie, Gilbert's only daughter, of her early and
mysterious death, and still more, to them, unaccountable
burial. All that could be gathered in
relation to this unhappy maiden, was dark and
unsatisfactory: her death had seemingly, in some
way, produced the destruction of the family and
the alienation of the estate. It was an event of more
than twenty years back; and from that period, until
the time of his own sudden fight, Mr. Gilbert's
doors were no longer open, and his sons were no
more seen associated with the young men of the
county. The maiden had died suddenly, and been
interred in a private place on the estate.

In connexion with this event, some, more garrulous
than others, were wont to speak of Colonel
Falconer, the present proprietor of Hawk-Hollow,
as having had some agency in the catastrophe;
but what it was, they either knew not, or they
feared to speak. Evil suspicions, however, gathered
about this gentleman's name; and as he was
seldom, if ever, seen in Hawk-Hollow in person,
but had committed the stewardship of the property
to the hands of a distant relative, who resided on
it, the young felt themselves at liberty to fill up
from imagination, the sketch left imperfect by the
old; and accordingly, the Colonel, in time, came
to be considered by those who had never seen
him, as one of the darkest-hearted and most dangerous
of his species. He was very rich; the

station he occupied in the eyes of his country was
lofty, and might have been esteemed noble; for he
had shed his blood in the great and fearful battle
of rights that was now approaching to a close;
and after being disabled by severe and honourable
wounds, he had changed the sphere of his exertions,
and was now as ardent and devoted a patriot
in the senate as he had been before in the field.
Yet in this distant quarter, these recommendations
to favour were forgotten; it was said, if he had
done good deeds, there were evil ones enough to
bury them as in a mountain, and if he had fought
well for his country, he had struggled still more
devotedly to aggrandize himself. In a word, he
was called a hard, avaricious, rapacious man,
whose chief business was to enrich himself at the
cost of the less patriotic, and who had got the
mastery of more sequestrated estates than an
honest man could have come by. It was a sin of
an unpardonable nature, that he had succeeded in
getting possession of Hawk-Hollow, when there
were so many others in the county who had set
their hearts upon it.

His representative on the estate was a certain
Captain John Loring, who, with all the patriotism
of his connexion, and perhaps a great deal more,
had never been able to turn it to any account. On
the contrary, beginning the world with an ample
patrimony, at the time when Mr. Falconer commenced
as an adventurer, he had descended in
fortune with a rapidity only to be compared with
that of his friend's exaltation. The love of glory
had early driven him from his peaceful farm on
the Brandywine; and after distinguishing himself
as a volunteer in the Indo-Gallic wars of Western
Pennsylvania, it was his hard fate to bring his
career of effective service to a close on what he
was always pleased to call the Fatal Field of Braddock.

From that bloody encounter he came off
with more honour than profit, and with a body so
mangled and a constitution so shattered, that a
quarter of a century had scarce served to repair
the dilapidation of his animal man. But the Captain
had lost neither his spirit nor his love of glory. At
the first trump of the Revolution, he donned the
panoply of valour; he snatched up the pistols he
had taken from a dead Canadian at the Fatal Field
of Braddock, strapped upon his thigh the sword
he had received for his services in storming certain
Indian forts on the Alleghany river, clapped
into his pocket the commission which the colonial
government had granted him in reward of that
gallant exploit, and reported himself, among a
crowd of younger patriots, as ready to do and die
for his country. The Commissioners looked at his
gray hairs and shattered leg, (the latter of which
had once been as full of musket-bullets as was ever
a cartouche-box,) commended his virtue and enthusiasm,
and divided the honours of command
among those who were better fitted to do the state
service. The Captain retired to his patrimonial
estate, and there contented himself as well as he
could, until the current of conflict, diverted from
one bloody channel into another, came surging at
at last into the pastoral haunts of the Brandywine.
At that time, his home was blessed with two children,
a gallant boy of eighteen, and a merry little
maiden of twelve. But one morning, he heard a
trumpet pealing over the hills and a cannon roaring
hard by, behind the woods. He looked at the
face of his son, and the eye of the boy reflected
back the fire of his father's spirit. Their horses
were saddled in the stalls, and the spurs were
already on young Tom Loring's heels. It was
enough—the Captain carried his son to the grave.
—But, to his own dying day, he rejoiced over the
young man's fall. On this subject, the Captain
was commonly considered by his neighbours to be
crack-brained.

After this, came other misfortunes; and the Captain
was a ruined man, landless, homeless, and
childless, save that his little Catherine was still left
to share his poverty, and, like a lamp in a cavern,
to exaggerate rather than enlighten the gloom of
his desolation. At this critical juncture, he found
a firm and prudent friend in Colonel Falconer, by
whom he was installed into the privileges, if not
the actual possession of Hawk-Hollow, in the supervision
and improvement of which he seemed
now likely to pass the remainder of his days.
How far the kindly feelings of relationship, or how
far the influence of his daughter's growing beauty,
had contributed to secure him the benevolence of
this friend in need, was a question frequently agitated
by the curious villagers. It was settled
among them, that there was a wedding in the
wind; but whether the young lady was to share
the lot of her distinguished patron, or to be given
to his gay and somewhat wild-brained son, was a
point on which busy bodies were long coming at a
conclusion. The Captain, though frank enough in
his way, was not exactly the individual whom one
would think of troubling with impertinent questions;
and Miss Loring, however hospitable and
courteous, had not yet selected a confidante from
among the blooming nymphs of Hillborough.
She was, however, the theme of as much admiration
as curiosity; and being very beautiful, and of
manners always gentle, and at times irresistibly
engaging, the village poet immortalized her in
rhyme, and the village belles forgave the eulogium.

It remains but to say a word more of the Gilberts,
as a necessary introduction to a record, designed

to rescue the story of their fate from the
uncertain and unfaithful lips of tradition. After
mingling in all the border wars, both Indian and
civil, that, from the time of Braddock's defeat to
the dispersion of the Connecticut settlers, distracted
the unhappy Susquehanna settlements, they deserted
the cause of their countrymen at the beginning
of the Revolution, and appeared in the guise of
destroying demons, at Wyoming, on that occasion
of massacre, which has given to the spot a celebrity
so mournful. In other words they were traitors
and refugees; and however dreadful the reputation
they obtained as bold and successful depredators,
their fate was such as might have been, and perhaps
was, anticipated by themselves. One after
another, they were cut off, some by the rifle and
tomahawk, one even by the halter, and all who did
perish, by deaths of violence. It was indeed, at
the time we speak of, confidently believed that
Oran, the eldest of all, and the last survivor, had
fallen within the space of a year, at a conflict on
the banks of the Mohawk, along with other refugees
of the neighbouring commonwealth, with
whom he had associated himself. Great were the
rejoicings in consequence with all who dwelt
among the scenes of his earlier exploits; though
some professed to have their doubts on the subject,
and swore, that Oran Gilbert was not to be trusted,
dead or alive, until his scalp was seen nailed on
the county court-house door.