University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER IV.
THE MOTH FLIES INTO THE CANDLE.

The invitation which Mr. Bernard Langdon
had accepted came from the Board of Trustees
of the “Apollinean Female Institute,” a school
for the education of young ladies, situated in the
flourishing town of Rockland. This was an establishment
on a considerable scale, in which a
hundred scholars or thereabouts were taught the
ordinary English branches, several of the modern
languages, something of Latin, if desired, with a
little natural philosophy, metaphysics, and rhetoric,
to finish off with in the last year, and music
at any time when they would pay for it. At the
close of their career in the Institute, they were
submitted to a grand public examination, and received
diplomas tied in blue ribbons, which proclaimed
them with a great flourish of capitals to
be graduates of the Apollinean Female Institute.

Rockland was a town of no inconsiderable pretensions.
It was ennobled by lying at the foot
of a mountain, — called by the working-folks of
the place “the Maounting,” — which sufficiently
showed that it was the principal high land of the

district in which it was situated. It lay to the
south of this, and basked in the sunshine as Italy
stretches herself before the Alps. To pass from
the town of Tamarack on the north of the mountain
to Rockland on the south was like crossing
from Coire to Chiavenna.

There is nothing gives glory and grandeur and
romance and mystery to a place like the impending
presence of a high mountain. Our beautiful
Northampton with its fair meadows and noble
stream is lovely enough, but owes its surpassing
attraction to those twin summits which brood
over it like living presences, looking down into its
streets as if they were its tutelary divinities, dressing
and undressing their green shrines, robing
themselves in jubilant sunshine or in sorrowing
clouds, and doing penance in the snowy shroud
of winter, as if they had living hearts under their
rocky ribs and changed their mood like the children
of the soil at their feet, who grow up under
their almost parental smiles and frowns. Happy
is the child whose first dreams of heaven are
blended with the evening glories of Mount Holyoke,
when the sun is firing its treetops, and gilding
the white walls that mark its one human
dwelling! If the other and the wilder of the
two summits has a scowl of terror in its overhanging
brows, yet is it a pleasing fear to look
upon its savage solitudes through the barred
nursery-windows in the heart of the sweet, companionable
village. — And how the mountains

love their children! The sea is of a facile virtue,
and will run to kiss the first comer in any port he
visits; but the chaste mountains sit apart, and
show their faces only in the midst of their own
families.

The Mountain which kept watch to the north of
Rockland lay waste and almost inviolate through
much of its domain. The catamount still glared
from the branches of its old hemlocks on the
lesser beasts that strayed beneath him. It was
not long since a wolf had wandered down, famished
in the winter's dearth, and left a few bones
and some tufts of wool of what had been a lamb
in the morning. Nay, there were broad-footed
tracks in the snow only two years previously,
which could not be mistaken; — the black bear
alone could have set that plantigrade seal, and
little children must come home early from school
and play, for he is an indiscriminate feeder when
he is hungry, and a little child would not come
amiss when other game was wanting.

But these occasional visitors may have been
mere wanderers, which, straying along in the
woods by day, and perhaps stalking through the
streets of still villages by night, had worked their
way along down from the ragged mountain-spurs
of higher latitudes. The one feature of The
Mountain that shed the brownest horror on its
woods was the existence of the terrible region
known as Rattlesnake Ledge, and still tenanted
by those damnable reptiles, which distil a fiercer

venom under our cold northern sky than the
cobra himself in the land of tropical spices and
poisons.

From the earliest settlement of the place, this
fact had been, next to the Indians, the reigning
nightmare of the inhabitants. It was easy
enough, after a time, to drive away the savages;
for “a screeching Indian Divell,” as our fathers
called him, could not crawl into the crack of a
rock to escape from his pursuers. But the venomous
population of Rattlesnake Ledge had a
Gibraltar for their fortress that might have defied
the siege-train dragged to the walls of Sebastopol.
In its deep embrasures and its impregnable
casemates they reared their families, they met in
love or wrath, they twined together in family
knots, they hissed defiance in hostile clans, they
fed, slept, hybernated, and in due time died in
peace. Many a foray had the town's-people made,
and many a stuffed skin was shown as a trophy,
— nay, there were families where the children's
first toy was made from the warning appendage
that once vibrated to the wrath of one of these
“cruel serpents.” Sometimes one of them, coaxed
out by a warm sun, would writhe himself
down the hillside into the roads, up the walks
that led to houses, — worse than this, into the
long grass, where the bare-footed mowers would
soon pass with their swinging scythes, — more
rarely into houses, — and on one memorable occasion,
early in the last century, into the meetinghouse,

where he took a position on the pulpit-stairs,
— as is narrated in the “Account of Some
Remarkable Providences,” etc., where it is suggested
that a strong tendency of the Rev. Didymus
Bean, the Minister at that time, towards the
Arminian Heresy may have had something to do
with it, and that the Serpent supposed to have
been killed on the Pulpit-Stairs was a false show
of the Dæmon's Contrivance, he having come
in to listen to a Discourse which was a sweet
Savour in his Nostrils, and, of course, not being
capable of being killed Himself. Others said,
however, that, though there was good Reason
to think it was a Dæmon, yet he did come with
Intent to bite the Heel of that faithful Servant,
— etc.

One Gilson is said to have died of the bite of
a rattlesnake in this town early in the present
century. After this there was a great snake-hunt,
in which very many of these venomous beasts
were killed, — one in particular, said to have been
as big round as a stout man's arm, and to have
had no less than forty joints to his rattle, — indicating,
according to some, that he had lived
forty years, but, if we might put any faith in
the Indian tradition, that he had killed forty
human beings, — an idle fancy, clearly. This
hunt, however, had no permanent effect in keeping
down the serpent population. Viviparous
creatures are a kind of specie-paying lot, but
oviparous ones only give their notes, as it were,

for a future brood, — an egg being, so to speak,
a promise to pay a young one by-and-by, if
nothing happen. Now the domestic habits
of the rattlesnake are not studied very closely,
for obvious reasons; but it is, no doubt, to
all intents and purposes oviparous. Consequently
it has large families, and is not easy
to kill out.

In the year 184—, a melancholy proof was
afforded to the inhabitants of Rockland, that the
brood which infested The Mountain was not
extirpated. A very interesting young married
woman, detained at home at the time by the
state of her health, was bitten in the entry of
her own house by a rattlesnake which had found
its way down from The Mountain. Owing to
the almost instant employment of powerful remedies,
the bite did not prove immediately fatal;
but she died within a few months of the time
when she was bitten.

All this seemed to throw a lurid kind of
shadow over The Mountain. Yet, as many
years passed without any accident, people grew
comparatively careless, and it might rather be
said to add a fearful kind of interest to the romantic
hillside, that the banded reptiles, which
had been the terror of the red men for nobody
knows how many thousand years, were there still,
with the same poison-bags and spring-teeth at
the white men's service, if they meddled with
them.

The other natural features of Rockland were
such as many of our pleasant country-towns can
boast of. A brook came tumbling down the
mountain-side and skirted the most thickly settled
portion of the village. In the parts of its
course where it ran through the woods, the water
looked almost as brown as coffee flowing from
its urn, — to say like smoky quartz would perhaps
give a better idea, — but in the open plain
it sparkled over the pebbles white as a queen's
diamonds. There were huckleberry-pastures on
the lower flanks of The Mountain, with plenty
of the sweet-scented bayberry mingled with the
other bushes. In other fields grew great store of
high-bush blackberries. Along the road-side were
barberry-bushes, hung all over with bright red
coral pendants in autumn and far into the winter.
Then there were swamps set thick with dingy
alders, where the three-leaved arum and the
skunk's-cabbage grew broad and succulent, —
shelving down into black boggy pools here and
there, at the edge of which the green frog, stupidest
of his tribe, sat waiting to be victimized by
boy or snapping-turtle long after the shy and
agile leopard-frog had taken the six-foot spring
that plumped him into the middle of the pool.
And on the neighboring banks the maiden-hair
spread its flat disk of embroidered fronds on the
wire-like stem that glistened polished and brown
as the darkest tortoise-shell, and pale violets,
cheated by the cold skies of their hues and perfume,

sunned themselves like white-cheeked invalids.
Over these rose the old forest-trees, —
the maple, scarred with the wounds which had
drained away its sweet life-blood, — the beech, its
smooth gray bark mottled so as to look like the
body of one of those great snakes of old that
used to frighten armies, — always the mark of
lovers' knives, as in the days of Musidora and her
swain, — the yellow birch, rough as the breast of
Silenus in old marbles, — the wild cherry, its little
bitter fruit lying unheeded at its foot, — and, soaring
over all, the huge, coarse-barked, splintery-limbed,
dark-mantled hemlock, in the depth of
whose aerial solitudes the crow brooded on her
nest unscared, and the gray squirrel lived unharmed
till his incisors grew to look like ram's-horns.

Rockland would have been but half a town
without its pond; Quinnepeg Pond was the
name of it, but the young ladies of the Apollinean
Institute were very anxious that it should
be called Crystalline Lake. It was here that the
young folks used to sail in summer and skate in
winter; here, too, those queer, old, rum-scented,
good-for-nothing, lazy, story-telling, half-vagabonds,
who sawed a little wood or dug a few
potatoes now and then under the pretence of
working for their living, used to go and fish
through the ice for pickerel every winter. And
here those three young people were drowned, a
few summers ago, by the upsetting of a sail-boat

in a sudden flaw of wind. There is not one of
these smiling ponds which has not devoured more
youths and maidens than any of those monsters
the ancients used to tell such lies about. But
it was a pretty pond, and never looked more innocent
— so the native “bard” of Rockland said
in his elegy — than on the morning when they
found Sarah Jane and Ellen Maria floating
among the lily-pads.

The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it
was more commonly called, was, in the language
of its Prospectus, a “first-class Educational Establishment.”
It employed a considerable corps
of instructors to rough out and finish the hundred
young lady scholars it sheltered beneath its roof.
First, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, the Principal and
the Matron of the school. Silas Peckham was
a thorough Yankee, born on a windy part of the
coast, and reared chiefly on salt-fish. Everybody
knows the type of Yankee produced by this climate
and diet: thin, as if he had been split and
dried; with an ashen kind of complexion, like
the tint of the food he is made of; and about as
sharp, tough, juiceless, and biting to deal with as
the other is to the taste. Silas Peckham kept a
young ladies' school exactly as he would have
kept a hundred head of cattle, — for the simple,
unadorned purpose of making just as much
money in just as few years as could be safely
done. Mr. Peckham gave very little personal attention
to the department of instruction, but was

always busy with contracts for flour and potatoes,
beef and pork, and other nutritive staples,
the amount of which required for such an establishment
was enough to frighten a quartermaster.
Mrs. Peckham was from the West, raised on Indian
corn and pork, which give a fuller outline
and a more humid temperament, but may perhaps
be thought to render people a little coarse-fibred.
Her specialty was to look after the
feathering, cackling, roosting, rising, and general
behavior of these hundred chicks. An honest,
ignorant woman, she could not have passed an
examination in the youngest class. So this distinguished
institution was under the charge of a
commissary and a housekeeper, and its real business
was making money by taking young girls in
as boarders.

Connected with this, however, was the incidental
fact, which the public took for the principal
one, namely, the business of instruction.
Mr. Peckham knew well enough that it was just
as well to have good instructors as bad ones, so
far as cost was concerned, and a great deal better
for the reputation of his feeding-establishment.
He tried to get the best he could without paying
too much, and, having got them, to screw all
the work out of them that could possibly be extracted.

There was a master for the English branches,
with a young lady assistant. There was another
young lady who taught French, of the ahvahng

and pahndahng style, which does not exactly
smack of the asphalt of the Boulevards. There
was also a German teacher of music, who sometimes
helped in French of the ahfaung and bauntaung
style, — so that, between the two, the young
ladies could hardly have been mistaken for Parisians,
by a Committee of the French Academy.
The German teacher also taught a Latin class
after his fashion, — benna, a ben, gahboot, a head,
and so forth.

The master for the English branches had lately
left the school for private reasons, which need not
be here mentioned, — but he had gone, at any
rate, and it was his place which had been offered
to Mr. Bernard Langdon. The offer came just
in season, — as, for various causes, he was willing
to leave the place where he had begun his new
experience.

It was on a fine morning, that Mr. Bernard,
ushered in by Mr. Peckham, made his appearance
in the great schoolroom of the Apollinean Institute.
A general rustle ran all round the seats
when the handsome young man was introduced.
The principal carried him to the desk of the
young lady English assistant, Miss Darley by
name, and introduced him to her.

There was not a great deal of study done that
day. The young lady assistant had to point out
to the new master the whole routine in which the
classes were engaged when their late teacher left,
and which had gone on as well as it could since.

Then Master Langdon had a great many questions
to ask, some relating to his new duties, and
some, perhaps, implying a degree of curiosity not
very unnatural under the circumstances. The
truth is, the general effect of the schoolroom,
with its scores of young girls, all their eyes
naturally centring on him with fixed or furtive
glances, was enough to bewilder and confuse a
young man like Master Langdon, though he
was not destitute of self-possession, as we have
already seen.

You cannot get together a hundred girls, taking
them as they come, from the comfortable and
affluent classes, probably anywhere, certainly not
in New England, without seeing a good deal of
beauty. In fact, we very commonly mean by
beauty the way young girls look when there is
nothing to hinder their looking as Nature meant
them to. And the great schoolroom of the Apollinean
Institute did really make so pretty a show
on the morning when Master Langdon entered
it, that he might be pardoned for asking Miss
Darley more questions about his scholars than
about their lessons.

There were girls of all ages: little creatures,
some pallid and delicate-looking, the offspring
of invalid parents, — much given to books, not
much to mischief, commonly spoken of as particularly
good children, and contrasted with another
sort, girls of more vigorous organization, who
were disposed to laughing and play, and required

a strong hand to manage them; — then
young growing misses of every shade of Saxon
complexion, and here and there one of more
Southern hue: blondes, some of them so translucent-looking,
that it seemed as if you could see
the souls in their bodies, like bubbles in glass, if
souls were objects of sight; brunettes, some with
rose-red colors, and some with that swarthy hue
which often carries with it a heavily-shaded lip,
and which with pure outlines and outspoken reliefs,
gives us some of our handsomest women,
— the women whom ornaments of plain gold
adorn more than any other parures; and again,
but only here and there, one with dark hair and
gray or blue eyes, a Celtic type, perhaps, but
found in our native stock occasionally; rarest
of all, a light-haired girl with dark eyes, hazel,
brown, or of the color of that mountain-brook
spoken of in this chapter, where it ran through
shadowy woodlands. With these were to be
seen at intervals some of maturer years, full-blown
flowers among the opening buds, with
that conscious look upon their faces which so
many women wear during the period when they
never meet a single man without having his monosyllable
ready for him, — tied as they are, poor
things! on the rock of expectation, each of them
an Andromeda waiting for her Perseus.

“Who is that girl in ringlets, — the fourth in
the third row on the right?” said Master Langdon.

“Charlotte Ann Wood,” said Miss Darley; —
“writes very pretty poems.”

“Oh! — And the pink one, three seats from
her? Looks bright; anything in her?”

“Emma Dean, — day-scholar, — Squire Dean's
daughter, — nice girl, — second medal last year.”

The master asked these two questions in a
careless kind of way, and did not seem to pay
any too much attention to the answers.

“And who and what is that,” he said, — “sitting
a little apart there, — that strange, wild-looking
girl?”

This time he put the real question he wanted
answered; — the other two were asked at random,
as masks for the third.

The lady-teacher's face changed; — one would
have said she was frightened or troubled. She
looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear
the master's question and its answer. But the
girl did not look up; — she was winding a gold
chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if
in a kind of reverie.

Miss Darley drew close to the master and
placed her hand so as to hide her lips. “Don't
look at her as if we were talking about her,” she
whispered softly; — “that is Elsie Venner.”