 | Peter Pilgrim, or, A rambler's recollections |  |
THE LEGEND
OF
MERRY THE MINER.
1. CHAPTER I.
The central region of the United States,
embracing the district of East Tennessee
and the adjacent mountain counties of
Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina, is
less known to Americans generally than the
remotest nooks of Florida, or the North
West Territory. At a distance from the
great routes of travel, without navigable
rivers, presenting on every side a frowning
barrier of wild and savage mountains, heaped
in continuous and inextricable confusion
over its whole surface, a portion of it, too,
still in the hands of its aboriginal possessors,[1]
it has repelled, rather than invited, visitation,
which will vanish only when the engineer has
tracked its glens and gorges with paths of
iron, and flying locomotives thunder along its
ridges. When that period shall have arrived,
it will perhaps be discovered, that no part
of the United States offers greater attractions
to the lovers of the picturesque and the
wonderful, that none opens a grander display
of scenery, or richer exchequer of curiosities.
Then, too, perhaps—if the bursting of the
world into his sequestered valley should
arouse some sleepy Tennessean from inglorious
inactivity, infuse into his breast a little
pride of country, a little shame that a clime
so fair and beneficent should want a historian,
that a state so powerful and distinguished
should have produced no son able or
willing to write the records of her days of
trial and adventure—it will be found that
no part of the country possesses a greater
or more interesting fund even of legendary
and historic incident. The sparklings of the
lost Pleiad of American states—the little republic
of Frankland, that scintillated a moment
on that ridgy horizon, and then was
extinguished for ever—and the campaigns of
the gallant Sevier, are worthy to be chroni
bravest achievements, of that eventful era.
The `rarities'—as the old geographers
would have termed them—of this mountain
land, comprise waterfalls—the Tuccoa and
the Falling Water, for example—with others,
perhaps, as grand and as lovely—whirlpools
and sinking rivers, cliffs, and caverns; and
the still more interesting memorials of antiquity—the
mounds and fortifications; the
painted cliffs; the rocks on which the eye, or
the imagination, traces the foot-prints of
shodden horses, and even the tracks of wheeled
carriages; the graveyards of pygmies and
giants, whence have been dug so many thousand
bones of manikins of two feet in stature,
and Patagonians of eight;[2]
the axes and
silver; the coins; the walled wells; the old
gold mines, with furnaces and crucibles; the
yellow-haired mummies; and other vestiges
of the unknown and perished races of men
that once possessed, it would seem, the whole
Mississippi Valley.
Of these relics many are found in the
caves, which, besides the above-mentioned
yellow-haired mummies and Cyclopean skeletons,
(for the big bones are usually, though
not exclusively, found in caverns,) are, in
some cases, reported to possess still more
astonishing monuments of the primeval
world—petrified men—stony warriors and
hunters of the days of Nimrod, who, with dog
and spear, chased the megalonix into his hole,
and there perished with him; or antediluvian
gold-miners that plied their trade in these
darksome retreats, and, in unholy passion,
“forgot themselves to marble,” or were transformed
by the demons of the mine into their
own effigies.
Such wild stories, frequently revived, and
additions or diminutions, though regarded as
novelties, I suspect, must, in some way or
other, owe their origin to one common source,
to some fragmentary hint or distorted reminiscence
of the ancient, veritable, but now
almost forgotten legend of Merry the Miner
—a wight of whose adventures I have been
at the pains to inquire and record every particular
that is now remembered.
Of the birthplace and early adventures of
this remarkable personage nothing is known;
even his “given” name has been lost, his surname
only surviving, with the suffix that supplies
the place of the lost portion. He first
appeared, at a very early day, in one of the
extreme eastern counties of Tennessee, a settler
like others, as it seemed; for he had a wife
and family, with whom he seated himself, or
perhaps squatted, upon a farm that might,
though none of the richest, have yielded him
a comfortable subsistence, had he taken the
pains to cultivate it.
But Merry, it soon appeared, had other
thoughts and objects; for, having completed a
rude cabin sufficient to shelter his children,
cleared for them a few acres of ground, and helped
them to set it in corn, for the winter's subsistence,
from his mind all farther care of them, and
began to ramble up and down the mountains,
a bag slung upon one shoulder, a rifle on the
other, remaining absent from home generally
all day long, and sometimes a week together.
At first, he was supposed by his few neighbors
who noted his proceedings, to be absent
on hunting expeditions, until it was observed
that he seldom returned so well provided with
game as with fragments of stone and minerals,
with which useless commodities his sack
was usually well filled.
This produced questions, and questions
brought replies; and Merry, who, though absorbed
by his pursuits, was not of a selfish
or incommunicative disposition, gave them to
understand he had better game in view than
bear, elk, or deer; in short, that he was hunting
for gold; with which precious metal, he
averred, these very mountains abounded; a
fact which, he declared, with a great deal of
wild enthusiasm, he was very sure of; for,
first, an old Cherokee Indian had told him so
when he was a boy; secondly, a great scholar
had assured him of the same thing, declaring
that the Spaniards had once, in the days of
De Soto, been at the mountain mines and
away, or killed them; thirdly, his father, who
had, in his time, been an Indian trader, and
made a fortune thereby, was of the same
opinion, because of the jealousy of the Indians,
who would never suffer a white man
to examine too closely into their soil for
minerals;[3] and finally, because every one
knew there were bits of gold sometimes
found in Virginia and the Carolinas, along
the rivers that flowed from the mountains,
from which it was plain the gold must have
been washed down from the mountains. To
this he added, that he had himself been, for
ten years or more, hunting for the precious
place of deposit, and it was, therefore, but
reasonable to suppose he must soon succeed
in finding it. He had often discovered places
where there was a little gold to be gathered,
but it was a very little; and he should not
stop short till he had lighted on the true
mines that had been worked of old by the
Spaniards, the discovery of which would certainly
be a fortune to him.
This representation had its effects upon
Merry's friends; who, being shown a store of
places, and abounding, as he said, in lead,
copper, and other ignoble metals, together
with sundry touchstones, a blowpipe, a bottle
of acid, and other simple implements of the
art metallurgic, of which he had in some way
learned the use, were very ready to assist
him in a pursuit that promised to lead to
fortune; and for a few months, the whole
neighbourhood was rambling with him over
the hills, in search of hidden treasures. As
no gold was, however, found, nor, indeed, the
least sign of any, the enthusiasm for gold-hunting
soon abated in all but Merry himself,
who, at first deserted by his friends, was at
last derided by them as a crack-brained
schemer, whose efforts were more likely to
ruin a fortune than to make one.
And, indeed, it appeared from some expressions
of Merry's wife, who by no means
relished her husband's neglect of his family
and affairs, that he had already, or his family
for him, paid dear for his gold mine, having
been originally the possessor of a sufficient
and comfortable estate, a good patrimonial
farm, and slaves to till it; all which had slipped
through his fingers in the course of his
ten years' wanderings.
Desertion and derision, however, produced
no change in honest Merry; who having remained
long enough in his first seat to explore
every nook and cranny among the
adjacent hills, and satisfy himself that the
object of his search was not there, drew up
his stakes one fine morning, removed his
habitation some fifty or sixty miles further
west, and there, having constructed another
cabin, and cleared another field, recommenced
his explorations precisely as he had
done before, and with exactly the same results;
except that on this, as well as on all
future occasions, his character having travelled
before him, he found no neighbours willing
to unite with him in his enterprise. But this
was an affair of no consequence to Merry the
Miner; who, equable and contented on all
subjects except that of his gold mine, was
equally satisfied to share his hopes and
labours with others, or to enjoy them alone.
Nor did the ridicule and general contempt
under which he fell, much affect him: “By
and by,” said he, “I shall find a gold mine,
and then they will treat me well enough.”
The reproaches of his dear spouse were
not always received with the same equanimity;
but the practice which caused them
some of the uncharitable have hinted,
that if his golden monomania had not
been enough to drive him from his habitation,
the lectures of his helpmate would have been
cause sufficient.
Again unsuccessful, again the untiring
Merry changed his quarters; and this he continued
to do year after year, until he had consumed
ten more years in the unavailing
search. By this time his spirit was fainting
a little within him, and doubts began to oppress
him sore. Gray hairs were thickening
on his temples, and his fortune was not yet
made; on the contrary, poverty, after many
premonitory knocks, had passed his door, and
taken the best seat on his hearth. His
children had grown up, and grown up unaccustomed
to rule, at least for the five last
years; for, five years before, Merry had followed
his wife to the grave; after which her
children took matters into their own hands,
and grew up the way they liked best. One
after another, they dropped away from their
father to seek their own fortunes, until at last,
one—one only of all remained, his youngest
daughter, who was handsome and, as Merry
thought, good, for she was faithful when the
Merry, as he again trudged to the mountains,
one bright morning; “when I find a gold
mine, she shall know what it is to be a good
daughter, for she shall have it all to herself.
No, not all,” he muttered; “for the rest
will come back, and they must have something,
to know their father was hunting gold,
not for himself, but for them. But Susie, my
darling Susie, shall have the most of it, because
she was faithful to her father.”
When Merry returned again from the
mountains, his darling Susie was gone—gone
with a villain, for whom she had forsaken her
parent. Merry sat down in his deserted
cabin, and there remained for a week, content,
for the first time in twenty years, to remain
at home, when home had nothing further
to attract him.
On the seventh day, Merry again seized his
sack and rifle, and whistling to his dog Snapper
—for so he called him—an ugly, starveling cur
that had long been his companion, and now
was the only living thing upon whose fidelity
he knew he could rely—made his way up the
wild little valley in which his cabin stood,
following the course of a brawling river that
watered it. This river—fed by a hundred
of the mountain, in whose cloven and contorted
flank the little vale was but one of
many embayed recesses—Merry had often before
thridded, examining its different forks up
to their springs; where—upon his principle of
belief, that when gold is found in a river, it
must have been washed down from its sources
—he always seemed to think there was the
best prospect of discovering his long sought
mine. He had thus followed them all, or
thought he had done so; and having found
them all equally destitute of treasure, he
would himself, perhaps, have been puzzled to
say why he now set out again in the same
direction. Another person, however, might
have found a sufficient explanation in the agitation
of mind of the poor wanderer, whose
every look and step bore witness to the disorder
of his spirits.
Up this rivulet, then, he wandered, without
well knowing or noting whither; clambering
up the ledgy banks of one of its chief springs,
now nearly dried up, which he began, after a
time, to have a vague suspicion he had never
before explored. It had a new, fresh look
about it that gradually wrought upon his attention,
and was fast wakening him from abstraction;
flight by Snapper, the dog, who set up a
yelp or howl, Merry knew not which, but it
sounded very wild and mournful in that desolate
place, and fell to scratching in the
shingly bed of the torrent, as if disinterring a
rat or some other object of equal interest, ever
and anon looking around to his master, as if
to invite him to his assistance.
Merry approached and took from under
the paw of the dog a bit of stone, or sparry
concretion, of a very odd appearance, having
a kind of rude resemblance to a thumb and
fingers grasping something between them,
and that something exhibiting, at a broken
corner, a certain yellow gleam that made
Merry the Miner's heart leap within him.
With a little hammer drawn from his bag,
he broke off the ragged superfluities incrusting
what seemed a metallic core; an edge of
which he straightway rubbed on his flinty
touchstone. It left a yellow trace, as clear
and brilliant as heart could desire. Merry
drew out a vial of acid, and his hand trembled
as he applied it to the yellow trace. The
yellow trace vanished—No! it was the dimness
that came over the miner's eyes; the
yellow trace remained as bright and as beautiful
mineral into the acid; it hissed and fumed and
bubbled; but the yellow speck became the
broader and brighter. It was gold then—
`gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold!' and
Merry—But hark! Snapper howls again, and
again tears up the pebbles of the brook!
Merry clapped his prize into his sack, and
clambered up higher after the dog, admiring
at this own happiness in possessing an animal
of such marvellous sagacity, perhaps wondering,
too, how such an ugly brute should know
pebbles of gold from any others, and more especially,
how he should know his master was
seeking after them.
But Merry the Miner's mind was too full
of more important matters to question or
wonder long over the mystery. Snapper had
scratched from the shingle another specimen,
and one far more satisfactory and valuable
than the former—a lump of virgin gold as
big as a pigeon's egg, and looking not unlike
one, except that it was marked all over with
strange figures and fantastic shapes, so that
Merry almost doubted whether it was not a
work of art, instead of a freak of nature.
But while he was doubting, Snapper scratched
agian, and Merry picked up another piece;
six pieces, though none of them at all comparable
in size and value with the two pieces
first stumbled on.
But had they been less numerous or less
precious than they were, Merry would have
rejoiced none the less. He had struck the
path of fortune at last, and knew the goal
could not now be far off. Too eager to waste
time in hunting what he doubted not was a
mere subordinate and chance deposit of fragments
washed down from above, he gave
over the search, to continue his explorations
up towards the source of the brook.
As he rose, eager and exulting, his eye fell
by chance upon the little valley in which he
lived, now far below, and upon his distant
and deserted cabin. He sat down and wept.
What did gold avail him now? He had
found the long desired treasure; but his children
were lost to him for ever. For this,
then, he had bartered them away—squandered
the rich treasures of their love, and, worse
than all, the rich treasures of honour and virtue,
of reputation and happiness, that should
have formed their inheritance.
Many a man has felt, and many will feel,
like Merry the Miner, when, after a life of
counting-room, in the land-office or the stock-market,
the prize is won, and they lost who
might have been good and happy without it.
Bitter were the thoughts of Merry, and he
looked upon his prizes with the feelings of a
Timon. He cursed them; nay, he snatched
them up with a desperate intent to hurl them
away; when Snapper fetched another howl,
and—and Merry the Miner forgot his anger
and his grief. He clapped the golden fragments
into his sack, added another piece of
gold to his store; and, having now lost sight
of his cottage, followed, with Snapper, up the
mountain brook, exploring with eager care,
and impatient to arrive at its golden springs.
The way was long, the path was wild, and
the sun was in the meridian when Merry
reached the apparent source of the streamlet;
and he was then in the heart of a mountain
wilderness as wild, as desolate, as solitary as
imagination ever painted. High in air, shut
up among ridges that sloped up to heaven all
around him, bristled over with black firs or
speckled with gray rocks and precipices, no
companions but his dog, and the eagles that
sometimes swooped down from adjacent
peaks to view the invader of their realm,
a scene so august and lonely, had not the
feeling of the mine-hunter swallowed up
every other. His good luck had departed
from him; he had trudged miles without finding
any further traces of gold, or indeed any
thing at all remarkable, save fragments of
spar and stalagmitic concretions, in which
fancy traced a thousand resemblances to objects
he had left in the world behind him, as
well as to others that existed only in the
world of dreams. These, interesting as they
might have proved on another occasion,
Merry would now have joyfully exchanged
for a single bit of gold, the smallest that miner
ever picked out of earth. But the gold
had vanished, and Merry arrived at the head
of his rivulet only to be persuaded he had
arrived in vain.
A deep and narrow ravine, up which he
scrambled with infinite labour and pain, and
down which the feeble and dwindling waters
seemed to find it as difficult to flow—for
lazily, and with complaining murmurs, they
dropped from rock to rock, creeping and
moaning among obstructions, over which, it
was plain, at other seasons, a torrent came
bounding and roaring like a lion after his
miner advanced, and flinging a gray and
smoky midnight over all below, was suddenly
terminated by a precipice, from whose inaccessible
heights the stream fell in a dreary,
ever pattering, but meagre shower, while a
still feebler runnel oozed from a chasm in
the precipice, as if flowing from a spring in
the heart of the mountain.
Upon examining this chasm a little—there
came from it a faint, icy breath of air—Merry
was surprised to find it the entrance of a
cavern—a huge, yawning antre as black as
death, and gloomy, and ruinous, and mouldering
as a sepulchre of a thousand years.
Merry cared not a whit for caverns, great
or small; and as the feeble ray of light
admitted from the ravine did not penetrate
beyond a few feet, and disclosed a formidable
labyrinth of rocks and stalagmites covering
the watery floor, he felt no great desire to
disturb its solemn privacy. But Merry was
heated and wearied by his toilsome ascent of
the mountain, and the cool air of the cavern
tempted him to enjoy a moment of repose.
He sat down upon a rock and endeavored
with his eyes to fathom its hidden recesses,
but in vain. Nothing was to be seen but the
vague, shadowy, and undistinguishable. But
the ray of light, imperfectly disclosing the
darksome labyrinth, revealed, almost under
his feet, another object neither formidable
nor repulsive—a little topaz-hued star glistening
on the floor, from which Merry eagerly
snatched it up, and carried it to the light of
day. It was gold—a rounded mass inferior in
size only to the pigeon's egg, and bright and
pure as gold could be.
The belief in the former existence of races of pygmies
and giants in the Mississippi Valley, is extremely prevalent
in many Western communities; though the visits of scientific
men to the cemeteries of the former have been productive
of results that have shaken the faith of many in regard to the
pygmies. The celebrated graveyard on the Merameg river, in
Missouri, was examined by some of the scientific gentlemen
attached to Long's Expedition, who found bones of men and
infants of the ordinary Indian races in great abundance, but no
others. Bones from the Lilliputian graves in White County,
Tennessee, have also been proved to belong to mortals of
ordinary stature. The facts have not been so satisfactorily
settled in relation to the giants. There are thousands of respectable
men in Kentucky and Tennessee, who aver that
they have disinterred, and measured, human bones that must
have belonged to individuals eight feet in height; but none
of these bones have ever come in the way of savans.
This jealousy was remarked, many years since, by Bartram,
in his rambles among the Cherokee mountains.
2. CHAPTER II.
In a moment the cavern had lost its funereal
gloom, and shone upon Merry's imagination
a palace of light and loveliness, fit for the residence
of the gnome-king. The trunk of a mountain
pine, shivered by a tempest, had fallen into
the ravine, where it still lay, a magazine of
ready-made torches provided for any one willing
to enter the mystic abyss.
With the hatchet, which always formed a
part of his equipments, Merry easily succeeded
in riving off a bundle of resinous
splinters. A flint and steel afforded the
means of striking a light; and, flambeau in
hand, his gun left, as an encumbrance, in the
ravine, Merry immediately crept through the
tall, narrow fissure, into the cave; though his
dog Snapper, daunted by its repulsive appearance,
its entrance, filling the air with doleful howlings,
as his master vanished in the gloom;
and with these ominous sounds in his ears,
multiplied, and variously uttered, as they were,
by the echoes of the cave, Merry bade farewell
to his companion and the world of light.
Even with the torch flaming in his hand,
Merry's eyes failed to reach the boundaries of
the cave, its walls being no where visible except
immediately behind him, where they parted
away, right and left, from the entrance—itself
a blind, twisted gap, perceptible only at the
distance of a few feet—to be almost immediately
lost in darkness. Nothing, indeed,
could be well said to be visible except a few
rugged pillars rising here and there among
rocks and spars of all imaginable sizes, piled
and tumbled together in inconceivable confusion,
and presenting such fantastic shapes as
both kindled the imagination and struck the
spirit with awe. To Merry, who paused for
a moment aghast, it seemed as if each rock
was composed of animals, or parts of animals,
each a congeries of limbs, heads, trunks,
skeletons, cemented or incrusted together in
one hideous organic mass. Here glared
the head of a panther from among the ribs
the back of a horse; here a boa-constrictor
writhed under the shattered body of an ox;
and there a great sea-fish opened her yawning
jaws, in which bears and monkeys made
their den. Nay, Merry even fancied that, imbedded
in these frightful concretions, he could
behold the limbs and heads of human beings,
the former crushed and sprawling, the latter
staring ghastfully out with eyes of stone.
While Merry paused a moment, confounded
by these strange appearances, and doubtful
whither to proceed in search of the golden
stream, which was now lost among the rocky
apparitions, he heard it faintly murmuring in
the distance, at a point to which he did not
hesitate to direct his steps, and where he had
soon the satisfaction to discover it flowing
down a broad stair-case of rock, as regular
almost as if cut by the hands of man.
Here Merry again paused, nay, recoiled a
moment in consternation; for upon that staircase
stood the gigantic figure of a man,
grim, shadowy, terrible, his countenance, as
far as a countenance could be seen that was,
like his whole body, incrusted over with stone,
convulsed with some nameless agony, and his
attitude, which was that of flight, of flight
his limbs as with fetters of iron, expressive
of a deep but majestic despair. A tunic, sustained
by a broad baldrick; sandals, or what
seemed sandals, upon his feet; and in his
hand the massive hilts of a sword, whose
blade had long since rotted away, were the
only accoutrements on a shape, in whose very
nakedness there was something august and
commanding.
Merry's hair bristled as he surveyed the
stony phantom; but by and by, convinced it
was no living creature, and moved by curiosity,
he approached, and even mustered
courage to touch the unconscious frame. It
was, as it seemed, a figure of stone, but how
formed Merry the Miner was not learned
enough to tell; but as he felt the vast limbs,
foully sheeted over with spar, a rough and
rigid coat formed by the drippings and deposits
of centuries, he could not but fancy a
human body was sepulchred within.
Merry the Miner forgot his gold, and his
hopes of gold. Wonder and curiosity absorbed
his spirit. He thought now only of
investigating a mystery so strange and so
new, of prosecuting still further a discovery
whose first fruits were so astonishing. He ascended
Twenty steps brought him to its summit,
where stood another colossal figure struggling
in the grasp of a third that lay upon
its face, half buried under a mound of stalagmite
that had grown around it, its arms
twined round his legs, its hair, long and flowing
like the locks of a woman, trodden under
his feet, with which he seemed endeavouring
to spurn the prostrate shape away. It was
a ghastly picture of terror overpowering the
feeble and unmanning the strong, of selfishness
converting woman's love and man's
devotion into frenzied contention and brutal
hate.
But a new spectacle drew Merry's eyes
from this unnatural group. The last step
of the staircase was ascended, and there
yawned upon him a new cave, vaster than
that he had left below, and filled with spectres
more wonderful and appalling; rank upon
rank, crowd upon crowd, multitude upon multitude,
they burst upon his view, the stony
effigies and relics of pre-Adamitic ages, the
remains and representatives of all races that
had lived and perished. It was a world of
stone—a petrified world; and Merry felt, as
the clang of his footsteps awoke the funeral
fearful shapes started into view, that he trod
upon accursed ground, among the doomed
inhabitants of a demolished sphere.
Were these, then, things of flesh? things
that had lived, and breathed, and walked the
earth? these things of bulk so enormous, of
shapes so strange and fearful? Ay, here they
were—creatures that had lived, and breathed,
and walked the earth—all in their general
sepulchre, not clad alone in the ordinary
vestures of decay, in bones and ashes, but in
form as when they lived, in body and, it seemed,
almost in substance, but grown over each
with a mantle of stone, a rime of rock, that
converted all into monumental statuary.
Here they were, all in wild confusion, all
flying in terror from a destiny which had,
nevertheless, overtaken them, and all expressing,
in their positions, the agony of annihilation.
It was a fearful picture of fate, a
grand and terrible, yet mournful, revealment
of the last moment of a world's perdition.
Merry's flesh again crept on his bones;
but he remembered all was stone around him,
and advanced, looking with mingled fear and
admiration upon the varied figures occupying
this subterraneous world, where all was left
the rocks which had fallen and covered all
with a new firmament, had here and there
dropped to the floor, forming piles and mounds
that crushed hundreds of animals beneath
them, and in other places had poured floods
of petrifying moisture that converted groups
of bodies into mountains of spar. Here,
among strange plants and trees of the primeval
forests, whose trunks formed stalactitic
pillars supporting the roof, Merry beheld the
magnificent monsters first revealed to human
eye by the labours of the geologist, though revealed
only in fragments—the Mastodon,
with his mighty tusks, huge and strong
enough to toss a mountain into the air; the
Megatherium, with claws to tear up trees,
and armour upon his back to sustain them in
the fall; the tremendous Dinotherium, with
teeth that dredged the bottoms of lakes and
rivers, and, hooked to some overhanging
rock or tree, supported the watery sluggard
in his sleep; the great Saurians,—huge and
hideously formed reptiles, to which the crocodiles
and anacondas of our own day were as
earthworms and lizards; with the primordial
horse, ox, rhinoceros, and other animals without
number and without name; all huddled
with them, in a confusion of terror that reduced
all to equality and fellowship in
misery.
Through this vast hall, following the course
of the brook, on which he relied to guide him
back to the realms of day, Merry pursued
his discovery, examining with interest the
various shapes on either side. But by and
by they ceased to appear: he had reached
the end of the Hall of Flight.
A few steps conducted him into another
chamber, where his eyes fell upon a sweeter
scene. It was a shepherd watching his
flocks, all, shepherd and flocks alike, of stone,
and all seeming to have passed to death in a
dreamy unconsciousness of their fate. Here
terror and anguish were no longer seen; and
Merry fancied he was about to behold the inhabitants
of the ancient world in a better aspect,
in their natural state and appearance
as when they lived. “Yes,” quoth he, well
pleased at the prospect—for the universal
agony he had passed through chilled him to
the heart—“I have seen how they died; I shall
now see, perhaps, how they lived.”
And so he did; for having proceeded a few
yards further, he found himself upon a huge
hosts of men, with sword and spear, arrow,
javelin, and war-club, with horses and chariots,
waging a furious battle; in the very midst
of which their destiny, it seemed, had come
upon them. As they were engaged, so they
had perished, each his sword at his fellow's
throat, trampling under foot and hoof, crushing
with chariot wheels, thrusting with lances,
piercing with darts and arrows, raging and
destroying. Thus it was with them, even
with eternity at their elbow, their world falling
to pieces under their feet. Upon the borders
of death, they were anticipating his
coming; with one foot in the balance of judgment,
they were dragging with them the
blood of rapine and murder, to weigh them
down in condemnation forever.
“Ay!” quoth Merry the Miner, “and so
they do in the world above! all busily engaged
in cutting short for one another the little
moment of life assigned them by nature—all
madly eager adding gall and wormwood to
the little cup of happiness their destiny allows
them—all hot to prove their supremacy
over the beasts of the field, by exceeding them
in violence and enmity.”
Through this midnight battle-field Merry
corses, retaining even in stone, with the looks
of the dying and of death, vestiges of the
passions which impelled them to strife and
attended them in slaughter. Here was the
fiery youth urged by the love of glory—that
love called noble and generous, though it
aims at blood, and fills the world with orphans;
there the veteran, to whom use had
made slaughter an exciting pastime. Here
was the soldier fighting for his sixpence; there
the great captain leading up a thousand men
to die in a ditch, that he might go down to
future ages renowned in story. Here was
seen the throttle of hate, the grasp of rage
and desperation; there the wounded besought
quarter which the victor denied, and here the
victor, himself at last perishing, seemed to
entreat of Heaven the mercy he had denied
his fellows; while the contortions of agony
and despair spoke the late but unavailing remorses
of the dying. In short, it was a battle
field, in which Merry the Miner, as he himself
hinted in his half muttered apostrophe,
saw nothing that he might not have seen in
a `foughten field' in the world above.
By and by he had passed it through, glad
to escape its shocking spectacles. He then
street of a half ruined city, with houses on
either side, some overthrown, some sheeted
over with spar, but all wild, and antique, and
strange-looking, like the buried structures of
Herculaneum, or still more the ancient subterranean
cities of the East.
Here the first sight that struck Merry's
eyes was a knot of ferocious looking men,
sitting round a slab of stone, gambling; at
least, so they appeared to Merry, to whom
the avaricious exultation of one, who held
aloft what seemed a bag of coin just won;
the despairing looks of a second, who clasped
his hands in the frenzy of conscious ruin;
the scowl of a third, who seemed also a loser;
with the villany of a fourth, who, while appearing
to sympathize on one side of his face
with the winner, on the other with the losers,
was slyly abstracting a second bag of money
from the table; were proofs of the nature of
their employment not to be mistaken.
Merry saw and felt the moral of the scene.
He was struck with the brutal triumph of the
winner, whose happiness was the misery of
at least one other; with the humiliating grief
of that other; with the frowning ferocity of
the third man, who looked as if thirsting for
base roguery of the fourth, who made no
difficulty of stealing the treasure he could
not otherwise hope to master.
Merry the Miner saw and felt all this; and
could, had any one been by, have moralized
very prettily on the debasing effects of avarice.
But while he saw and felt, and was
able to moralize, the very passion he saw
thus variously personified, stole into his
bosom; and he longed to possess the bags of
coin, so temptingly displayed. He forgot he
was among the dead of a doomed world, and
was again a gold-hunter. He snatched at the
bag in the winner's hand; but bag and hand
were alike marble. He drew his hammer,
and with a blow shattered the arm of the
gambler; and down it dropped, with dismal
clanging, on the stone floor. Another blow
crushed the hand and bag to pieces, and
Merry's hopes were gratified. Out rolled
upon the floor a nest of antique golden coins,
which Merry, after admiring a moment, clapped
into his sack, among his other treasures.
He then attacked the second bag, and after
a deal of hammering, for it was fast cemented
to the stone table, succeeded in breaking
it also, and seizing its precious contents.
Merry proceeded onward, swelling with
hope and joy. He had forgotten his wonder
and curiosity about the ancient world, and
its strange discovery; his thoughts were now;
not of the sins and destruction of its people,
but of their wealth, of which he deemed himself
the heir apparent.
His next step brought him to a booth or
shop, where stood—was it a money-changer,
or an old clothesman and pawnbroker?
Merry could not tell, for the booth, was half
filled up with petrifaction, which encased the
old man up to the middle, and held also a
customer, a poor old tattered woman, glued
to his shopboard; but it was quite evident the
hoary sinner was cheating her—selling her
the ragged mantle he held in his hand for
twenty times its value, or buying it—if a
buyer—at as great a profit.
“How strange and pitiable,” quoth Merry
the Miner, “that men should cheat for money
—grind, fleece, cozen, rob—nay, rob even the
poor!” With these words, he knocked from
the shopman's girdle, where it hung suspended,
a purse of gold, the only valuable in the
booth which, as far as Merry could discover,
the petrified flood had not swallowed up.
The next sight struck him with horror. It
whom he had just murdered by beating out
his brains with a club.
“How vile,” quoth Merry the Miner, “must
be that love of gold which drives men to robbery
and murder!” Thus venting his indignation,
he smote from the robber's fist the
fruits of his double crime, and transferred
them to his own pocket.
A few more steps, and Merry found himself
in a market, or other public place, where,
among a multitude of people chaffering after
pennies with as much eagerness as if salvation
were in them, sat judges upon tribunals,
dealing out justice, and some of them, as
Merry thought, dealing it out at a very good
price. Certainly, he saw one very patriarchal
looking old gentleman fulminating the terrors
of the law, with one hand outstretched
against an unhappy complainant, whilst the
other, extended behind him, was receiving a
douceur dropped into it by the richer defendant.
At another tribunal stood a man, evidently
a bankrupt, dragged by clamorous creditors
before the tribunal, yet escaping their
demands by an oath of destitution, which he
confirmed by raising his hands to heaven,
thereby disclosing a well crammed purse concealed
under his mantle.
“And men will even commit perjury for
money!” thought Merry, who, as he helped
himself to the wages of corruption and perjury,
began to feel somewhat uneasy at these
exemplifications of the effects of the love of
gold upon human nature. He turned to the
market house, and there beheld a father selling
his children into slavery, a mother bartering
away her daughter for a price.—In short,
he saw enough to convince him that man's
god was gold; and that of all gods it demanded
the richest sacrifices of its votary—the
sacrifice of his head and heart, of his honour,
virtue, happiness—nay, of his soul itself.
Merry's uneasiness increased. “Truly,”
quoth he, “if men will do these things for
gold, it must be a cursed thing. How know
I that it will not enchant me also into villany?”
He began to ask himself whether he
had never defrauded, robbed, murdered, borne
false witness, or done other evil for lucre's
sake. It was a great satisfaction to him to
be assured he had not, and to believe he
never could. Nevertheless, he could not divest
himself of a degree of consternation that
fastened upon his spirit, while yielding himself
to a passion whose debasing effects upon
others he saw pictured around him in acts of
meanness and iniquity of every grade and dye.
He could not divest himself of his fear; but
neither could he divest himself of his covetousness;
and he accordingly went on his way, exploring
the buried city, and ravishing the treasures
of the dead, of which, having prodigious
success, he soon collected more than he
could carry, or his sack contain; so that he
was obliged to empty it twice or thrice on
the path, leaving shining heaps, which he
designed removing afterwards at his leisure.
His success was the greater for his having,
after a time, hit upon a new branch of exploration.
He had often looked with a curious
eye upon the buildings that bounded the
street on either side, huge, strange structures,
here lying in ruins, there still standing, but almost
lost under thick shrouds of spar. It struck
him that if he could by any means make his
way into the interior of these houses, he
might light upon treasures of much more
value than all the purses he could hope to
filch from the corses in the street. Nor was
he disappointed; for having at last found
houses with penetrable doors, he entered
them, looking with awe upon their stony inhabitants,
some feasting, or seeming to feast,
at rich tables, some sleeping the sleep of
death in couches of marble; and with a delight
rich golden vessels and ornaments, the treasures
of the banqueting room, for which there
was no longer an owner.
Such visits into different houses enabled
him rapidly to increase the number of piles,
by which he marked his way along the street;
though, in his progress, he sometimes stepped
into mansions where nothing was gained but
wisdom. Once he entered a huge building,
in which he anticipated an unusual store of
treasure; but found himself in a prison filled
with felons expiating in chains crimes, which,
for aught he knew, the lust of pelf had driven
them to commit. Another time, he got into
a madhouse, where, among other bedlamites
raving in stone, was doubtless the usual proportion
of cases where the loss of gold, or
the fear of losing it, had converted the children
of God into gibbering monkeys.
Again, he found himself in a madhouse of
another kind, or rather madhouse and prison
in one; a hall of legislation, where fools were
destroying a nation, and knaves pilfering it,
and both parties quarreling upon the question
which best deserved the name of patriots.
3. CHAPTER IV.
Merry's next visit was into a mansion of
greater importance than any yet entered. It
was a royal palace, the court of a pre-Adamitic
sovereign; where, among the ruins of
his world, his kingdom, his house, sat the
piece of hardened clay that had held itself
superior to other clay, which it had worried
and agonized, trampled, racked, decapitated,
according to its sublime will and pleasure,
and been allowed to do so by the other clay,
the millions of pieces that owned its rule, because,
of all, there was not one shrewd enough
to conceive the superior convenience of
freedom, or having conceived it, who was
not willing to sell his thought, and his
liberty, for a piece of money. Here sat the
monarch surrounded by his court; his generals
his grandeur, his ministers who plied the besom
at home for a similar purpose. Here
were his buffoons and parasites, the soft
slaves of his pleasure and the instruments of
his wrath; his sellers and buyers of office; his
corruption-mongers and their customers; his
keepers of conscience without conscience, his
sages without wisdom, his saints without religion,
his friends without love, his servants
without faith, prostituted geniuses, bought patriots,
rogues, slaves—a mighty herd of servility
and corruption. Ay, here they all sat
or stood, glorious in the pomp of their golden
trappings, which the incrusting waters had
not yet hidden entirely from the eye.
Merry the Miner was too good a democrat
to be greatly daunted at the sight of a king
and court. In truth, he saw nothing so impressive
and interesting in king or courtier,
as the golden ornaments on their persons.—
Thus it must be with the glorious, when the
unsophisticated make their acquaintance in
the grave. The tomb-rat loves your great
man only for his tenderer flesh; and the Arab
of the Egyptian catacombs sees nothing in a
mummied Pharaoh, but an inflammable backlog
for his kitchen fire.
Merry lighted a new pine-knot, and then
with eyes that gloated in joy over the sepulchral
yet gorgeous assemblage, fell to work
in his vocation of plunder. He yielded
royalty so much respectful observance as to
commence operations on the monarch's person,
knocking from his anointed head the
golden crown that none remained to honour or
envy, and from his jewelled hand the sceptre
that was no longer the talisman of authority.
To these the insatiate Merry added the
chains of gold and diamonds around his majestic
neck; when, having despoiled the flinty
monarch of every valuable, he turned to his
royal consort and progeny, and to his ministers
and flatterers, all of whom he in like
manner disencumbered of their jewelled trappings.
And now, after an hour or two of labour
hard and unremitting—for it was no easy
task to detach the precious relics from their
crusts of stone—Merry the Miner paused to
congratulate himself upon his success. He
looked at his piles with joy: there were
enough of them to occupy him a day—nay,
many days—in removing them from the cave.
He clapped his hands, he laughed, he almost
danced; he was a happy man, he was a rich
the richest man in the world!”
With that, he sat down to rest his weary
bones—for, truly, his labour had well nigh
exhausted his strength—and to enjoy in prospect
the happiness which such store of wealth
seemed to assure him. The delight of revery
was added to the languor of fatigue; and
while his imagination took the airiest flights,
a pleasant lassitude stole over every limb.
It was a strange spectacle he presented, as
he sat in that damp charnel-house, where objects,
dimly revealed by his torch, put on a
double ghastliness—the living man rejoicing
over the treasures and hopes, of which the
dead around him spoke the hollow vanity.
But Merry thought not of the dead; how
could he, whose dreams were of lands and
houses—glorious domains spreading around
him, with palaces on them, and flocks and
herds, and hamlets and villages—nay, towns
and cities; for Merry the Miner was already
laying his lands out in town-lots, and calculating
the profits of the speculation: how could
he think of the dead, or of death?
No—Merry the Miner troubled himself not
at all with the monumental statues around
him; but by and by, having at length rested
his money at the expense of his neighbours,
he bethought him of rising, and removing his
treasures forthwith from the cave.
He bethought him of rising, and attempted
to do so—but in vain. A sudden palsy had
seized upon his body; there was a numbness
or stiffness in every joint, and it was increasing
every moment. A terrible idea entered
his mind; his heart leaped with perturbation
—it seemed almost the only muscle capable
of motion. He looked down upon his limbs:
they were already thickly crusted over with
spar, which the humid atmosphere of the
cave was depositing around them with fearful
rapidity. He felt the cold stone stiffening
on his fingers and freezing on his cheeks—
He, also, was becoming a petrifaction—a man
of stone, like all around him! His treasures,
his darling treasures, attacked by the subtle
vapour, had already vanished from his eyes.
But what cared Merry for treasure now?
Terror and anguish seized upon his spirit; he
gathered all his energies into an effort, and
struggled furiously to burst his bonds of
stone. As well might the wild-goat struggle
in the embrace of an anaconda, a fly in the
meshes of a spider. The incrustation crackled
he could neither move hand nor foot: he was
a rock, and part and parcel of the rock on
which he sat.
Thus a prisoner, a breathing corse, a living
fossil, Merry gave himself up to despair, and
raved and shrieked, until affrighted at the
echoes of his own voice. It seemed, indeed,
as they reverberated among the ruined walls
of the palace, and through the distant streets,
as if all the inhabitants of this petrified world
had found their voices, and replied to him
with yells as wild as his own. But shrieks
and struggles were alike vain; and by and by
he found himself deprived of the power even
of uttering a cry. The stony concretion was
gathering round his throat and jaws, and
mounting to his lips; where, though his warm
breath had as yet repelled the insidious vapour,
it threatened soon to attack him with
suffocation. In a few moments, and what
would remain of Merry the Miner?
In those few moments, how deep was the
agony, how wild the terror, how distracting
the thoughts of the unhappy Merry, who now
cursed his fate, and now the fatal avarice that
provoked it, now thought bitterly of his approaching
death, and now still more bitterly
a pursuit which had brought him nothing but
wo and ruin. Nothing that was agonizing,
nothing that was maddening, but Merry the
Miner had it passing through his mind in
those moments of imprisonment so strange
and fearful.
But the stone still grew around him; and
by and by, as the incrusting matter thickened
at his mouth and nostrils, he felt that he had
but another breath to draw, and then perish.
At that moment, the sound of a trumpet, a
single, tremendous note, burst through the
cave, and Merry's blood froze with fear.
That dreadful note seemed to thrill the dead
as well as the living. To Merry's eyes, dim
and filming, but not yet darkened, it seemed
as if each statue started with fear; he heard,
or fancied he heard, the rattling of their
sparry garments, and a dull sad moan issuing
from their marble lips.
Then there flashed into the cave the appearance
of a moving fire, in which approached
a figure as of a fallen angel,
majestic in mien, terrible yet mournful in aspect,
and on his brow the name of the Inexorable,
holding in his hand a flaming sword,
with which he touched the stony corses one
and wheresoever he touched, a flame
seemed to spring up within the statue, a
lurid, tormenting fire, that shone through it
as a lamp hidden within an alabaster vase.
“Thou,”—he cried, with a voice as dreadful
and mournful as his visage, touching at
the same time the monarch, in whose body
the fires immediately appeared—“Thou, because
thou didst hold thyself as the Lord of
them thou was sent to serve:—Ye”—touching
the ministers—“because ye were the
tools of his passions, who should have been
counsellors of wisdom and goodness; Ye”—
to the courtiers—“because ye were idolaters
and man-worshippers;” and so on, until he
had reached, in his course, the unhappy
Merry, who, beholding the sword of the Inexorable
thus stretched above his head, at
last betook himself for aid to a means which,
in his distraction, he had not yet thought of
—he muttered a prayer, not audibly, for his
lips were now sealed, but in the deep recesses
of his spirit.
The sword was turned aside; and with the
sad and solemn utterance—“He that hath
time left to pray, hath yet time to escape the
judgment”—the apparition glided away to
covering at the same moment melted from
Merry's body; and he, forgetting his gold, his
implements, his torches—forgetting every
thing but the terror that infused strength into
his liberated limbs, fled from the scene
amain. He fled, lighted at a distance by the
fires kindled by the Inexorable; whose voice
Merry could long hear pronouncing in the
street, the prison, and the city, and upon the
battle field, the words of doom; “Thou, for
thy blood guiltiness! Thou, for thy perjury!
Thou, for thy covetousness! Thou, for thy
ambition!” at every word setting some enclosed
spirit in flames, until the whole cavern
gleamed with the lights of hell.
These lights pursued the flying Merry
until he had almost reached the outlet of the
cavern; when the howlings of his faithful dog
directed him to the passage. Dashing
through the orifice, and scarcely pausing
even to catch up his gun, he fled down the
ravine and the course of the brook, running
like a madman until he reached at length his
own deserted home. He entered it a poorer
man than he had left it in the morning; his
sack and all the implements of his pursuit
having been abandoned in the cave, along
in the brook, not to speak of the more magnificent
treasures gathered in the cave itself.
But if Merry the Miner was now a poorer
man, he was also, or at least he thought himself,
a much wiser and better one than he
had ever been before. Gold-hunting he immediately
forswore, as a soul-endangering
occupation; he became, moreover, exceedingly
devout, and somewhat industrious, having
resolved, as he said, to be content with honest
poverty for the remainder of his days.
His story, as might be expected, produced
no common sensation among his neighbours,
some of whom, to Merry's astonishment and
grief, (for he told his story for the purpose,
and with the expectation, of deterring them
from all covetousness,) proposed to him to
conduct them to his wondrous cave; where,
for such a prize as he had abandoned, many
of them swore they were willing to face not
only his devil, for so they contemptuously
called the condemning spirit, but all the
devils that were ever heard of. This Merry
very resolutely refused to do: he had taken a
vow never to go nigh the place again, putting
himself in the way of temptation; it was as
much as his soul was worth. They then
This, also, Merry positively declined. Strong
in his newborn virtue, he was determined no
unlucky sinner should, through his means,
be put in the way of perdition; he would save
the souls of his friends, he declared, as well
as his own.
Upon this, his neighbours instituted a
search through the mountains, in hopes of
discovering the cave; but after several weeks
of fruitless exploration, gave up the attempt
in despair, some of them revenging their
failure on Merry by pronouncing him a lunatic
and dreamer, and declaring that his
whole story, his account of the cave, the
treasures, the petrified bodies, the adjudging
angel, was a mere fiction of a distempered
brain.
As for Merry himself, he little regarded the
imputation, but remained at home, practising
those virtues of industry and devotion that
seemed to prove him an altered man, until—
sorry I am to say it, but so the legend reports
of him—he grew tired of them. Whether
it was that he found honest poverty by no
means so agreeable or profitable as he hoped
to prove it—that the devotion begot by fear
is not in reality of the most perdurable
adventure was naturally lessened by time, it
seemed that he, by and by, began to neglect
his cornfield, to be an irregular and unfrequent
visiter at the religious meetings, which
he had for a while faithfully attended, and
was again, after a time, seen on his solitary
rambles among the mountains.
Yes, Merry the Miner was once more seen
with dog and gun bending his way towards
the hills; Merry the Miner had forgotten his
religion and his vow, and returned to his
original love and ancient passion. He had
thought upon the matter, and he thought a
happy thought. The cave was accursed and
forbidden ground, to be sure, with all its mysterious
treasures; but the brook that rolled
from it, bearing coins and jewels, to be scattered
unregarded on its bed—there was
nothing unholy, nothing perilous in the brook:
why should not Merry the Miner lay claim
to its unforbidden riches?
At this thought, Merry the Miner was conquered;
he snatched his gun, he called his
dog, and set out in quest of the brook. That
brook, however, to his surprise and consternation,
was no where to be found. There
were a thousand brooks rolling down the
the singular runnel of the cave. In the agitation
of his mind both while going and returning
from the cavern, he had forgotten to
take any note of the path by which he had
reached it; and now the place of the brook,
and the features that distinguished it from
others, were alike forgotten. Had he lost it
then? was he to be denied even the possession
of its little treasures?
Merry the Miner waxed wroth with his
hard fortune, and took another vow; he swore
he would find that brook again, if he sought it
to his dying day.
And this vow, it is believed, he religiously
kept. Year after year, he was seen wending
his solitary way up the mountains, exploring
every little stream, every foamy torrent, every
dried up channel, with an eager, hopeful eye.
Year after year, the search was continued,
with the same eagerness, the same hope, the
same ill fortune. His dog died with old age;
Merry himself grew palsied with years; but
still, day by day, his thin gray hairs were
seen fluttering in the breeze, as he tottered
along the mountain paths with zeal, as in his
better years, in quest of the golden brook and
perilous cavern.
How long the quest continued, and when
or how it ended, no one ever knew. Merry
at last vanished from men's eyes, and was
seen no more stealing like a ghost among
the woods and hills: but what had been his
fate could be only conjectured. Some few
years after he disappeared, a skeleton was
found by a party of hunters in a desolate
place among the mountains. It was generally
believed to be that of the poor gold-hunter,
who had perished in some unknown
way in his unfriended rambles.
Others there were who rejected the common
belief. According to them, Merry the
Miner had again lighted on his long sought
rivulet, had again entered his mystic cave;
and would there, perhaps, be discovered by
some future adventurer, a man of stone like
the shapes around him.
| Peter Pilgrim, or, A rambler's recollections | |