`` Yes , dearest , '' cried Matthew , pressing her tremulous form to his breast ; `` we will go hence and return to our humble cottage . The blessed sunshine and the quiet moonlight shall come through our window . We will kindle the cheerful glow of our hearth at eventide and be happy in its light . But never again will we desire more light than all the world may share with us . '' `` No , '' said his bride , `` for how could we live by day or sleep by night in this awful blaze of the Great Carbuncle ? '' Out of the hollow of their hands they drank each a draught from the lake , which presented them its waters uncontaminated by an earthly lip . Then , lending their guidance to the blinded cynic , who uttered not a word , and even stifled his groans in his own most wretched heart , they began to descend the mountain . Yet as they left the shore , till then untrodden , of the spirit 's lake , they threw a farewell glance toward the cliff and beheld the vapors gathering in dense volumes , through which the gem burned duskily . As touching the other pilgrims of the Great Carbuncle , the legend goes on to tell that the worshipful Master Ichabod Pigsnort soon gave up the quest as a desperate speculation , and wisely resolved to betake himself again to his warehouse , near the town-dock , in Boston . But as he passed through the Notch of the mountains a war-party of Indians captured our unlucky merchant and carried him to Montreal , there holding him in bondage till by the payment of a heavy ransom he had woefully subtracted from his hoard of pine-tree shillings . By his long absence , moreover , his affairs had become so disordered that for the rest of his life , instead of wallowing in silver , he had seldom a sixpence-worth of copper . Doctor Cacaphodel , the alchemist , returned to his laboratory with a prodigious fragment of granite , which he ground to powder , dissolved in acids , melted in the crucible and burnt with the blowpipe , and published the result of his experiments in one of the heaviest folios of the day . And for all these purposes the gem itself could not have answered better than the granite . The poet , by a somewhat similar mistake , made prize of a great piece of ice which he found in a sunless chasm of the mountains , and swore that it corresponded in all points with his idea of the Great Carbuncle . The critics say that , if his poetry lacked the splendor of the gem , it retained all the coldness of the ice . The lord De Vere went back to his ancestral hall , where he contented himself with a wax-lighted chandelier , and filled in due course of time another coffin in the ancestral vault . As the funeral torches gleamed within that dark receptacle , there was no need of the Great Carbuncle to show the vanity of earthly pomp . The cynic , having cast aside his spectacles , wandered about the world a miserable object , and was punished with an agonizing desire of light for the wilful blindness of his former life . The whole night long he would lift his splendor-blasted orbs to the moon and stars ; he turned his face eastward at sunrise as duly as a Persian idolater ; he made a pilgrimage to Rome to witness the magnificent illumination of Saint Peter 's church , and finally perished in the Great Fire of London , into the midst of which he had thrust himself with the desperate idea of catching one feeble ray from the blaze that was kindling earth and heaven . Matthew and his bride spent many peaceful years and were fond of telling the legend of the Great Carbuncle .
The tale , however , toward the close XXXXX their lengthened lives , did not meet with the full credence that had been accorded to it by those who remembered the ancient lustre of the gem .
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