



Produced by David Widger from page images generously
provided by the Internet Archive









THE DELECTABLE MOUNTAINS

By Arthur Colton

Charles Scribner's Sons

1901



DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF

MY SISTER, MABEL COLTON



|So they went up to the Mountains, to behold the Gardens, and Orchards,
the Vineyards, and Fountains of water.... Now there was on the tops of
these Mountains, Shepherds feeding their flocks, and they stood by the
high-way side. The Pilgrims therefore went to them, and leaning upon
their staves, (as is common with weary Pilgrims, when they stand to
talk with any by the way,) they asked, Whose delectable Mountains are
these?... When the Shepherds perceived that they were way-faring men,
they also put questions to them, as, Whence came you? and, How got you
into the way? and, By what means have you so persevered therein?... Then
said the Shepherds one to another, Let us here shew to the Pilgrims the
Gates of the Coelestial City, if they have skill to look through our
Perspective Glass.... Then they essayed to look, but... they could not
look steadily through the Glass; yet they thought they saw something
like the Gate.

_The Pilgrim's Progress_.



CONTENTS:

     1. The Place of Abandoned Gods
     2. The Leather Hermit
     3. Black Pond Clearing
     4. Joppa
     5. The Elders' Seat
     6. The Romance of the Institute
     7. Nausicaa
     8. Sanderson of Back Meadows
     9. Two Roads that meet in Salem
     10. A Visible Judgment
     11. The Emigrant East
     12. Tobin's Monument




THE PLACE OF THE ABANDONED GODS

|The hut was built two sides and the roof of sodded poles; the roof
had new clapboards of birch bark, but the rest had once belonged to a
charcoal burner; the front side was partly poled and partly open, the
back was the under-<DW72> of a rock. For it stood by a cliff, one of the
many that show their lonely faces all over the Cattle Ridge, except that
this was more tumultuous than most, and full of caves made by the clumsy
leaning bowlders; and all about were slim young birch trees in white and
green, like the demoiselles at Camelot. Old pines stood above the cliff,
making a soft, sad noise in the wind. In one of the caves above the
leafage of the birches we kept the idols, especially Baal, whom we
thought the most energetic; and in front of the cave was the altar-stone
that served them all, a great flat rock and thick with moss, where ears
of com were sacrificed, or peas or turnips, the first-fruits of the
field; or of course, if you shot a chipmunk or a rabbit, you could
have a burnt offering of that kind. Also the altar-stone was a council
chamber and an outlook.

It was all a secret place on the north side of the Cattle Ridge, with
cliffs above and cliffs below. Eastward half a mile lay the Cattle Ridge
Road, and beyond that the Ridge ran on indefinitely; southward, three
miles down, the road took you into Hagar; westward the Ridge, after all
its leagues of length and rigor of form, broke down hurriedly to the
Wyantenaug River, at a place called the Haunted Water, where stood
the Leather Hermit's hut and beyond which were Bazilloa Armitage's
bottom-lands and the Preston Plains railroad station. The road from
the station across the bridge came through Sanderson Hollow, where the
fields were all over cattle and lively horses, and met the Cattle Ridge
Road to Hagar. And last, if you looked north from the altar-stone, you
saw a long, downward sweep of woodland, and on and on miles and miles to
the meadows and ploughed lands toward Wimberton, with a glimpse of the
Wyantenaug far away to the left. Such were the surroundings of the place
of abandoned gods. No one but ourselves came there, unless possibly the
Hermit. If any one had come it was thought that Baal would pitch him
over the cliffs in some manner, mystically. We got down on our hands and
knees, and said, “O Baal!” He was painted green, on a shingle; but
his eyes were red. The place was reached from the Cattle Ridge Road by
trail, for the old wood-road below was grown up to blackberry brambles,
which made one scratched and bloody and out of patience, unless it were
blackberry time.

And on the bank, where the trail drops into the climbing highway, there
Aaron and Silvia were sitting in the June afternoon, hand in hand, with
the filtered green light of the woods about them. We came up from Hagar,
the three of us, and found them. They were strangers, so far as we knew.
Strangers or townsmen, we never took the trail with any one in sight;
it was an item in the Vows. But we ranged up before them and stared
candidly. There was nothing against that. Her eyes were nice and blue,
and at the time they contained tears. Her cheeks were dimpled and pink,
her brown dress dusty, and her round straw hat cocked a bit over one
tearful blue eye. He seemed like one who had been growing fast of late.
His arms swung loosely as if fastened to his shoulders with strings. The
hand that held her small hand was too large for its wrist, the wrist too
large for the arm, the arm too long for the shoulder. He had the first
growth of a downy mustache, a feeble chin, a humorous eye, and wore a
broad-brimmed straw hat and a faded black coat, loose and flopping to
his knees. A carpet bag lay at his feet, only half full and fallen over
with an air of depression. He seemed depressed in the same way.

“What's she crying for?” asked Moses Durfey, stolidly.

Aaron peered around at her shyly.

“She's scared to go home. I ain't, but I mote be 'fore I got there.”

“What's your name?”

“We-ell--”

He hesitated. Then, with loud defiance:

“It's Mr. and Mrs. Bees.”

A red squirrel clambered down a low-hanging branch overhead, and
chattered sharply, scattering flakes of bark. Aaron, still holding
Silvia's hand, leaned back on the bank and looked up. All lines of
trouble faded quickly from his face. He smiled, so that his two front
teeth stood out startlingly, and held up a long forefinger.

“Cherky little cuss, ain't he?”

The squirrel became more excited. Aaron's finger seemed to draw him
like a loadstone. He slid down nearer and nearer, as far as the branch
allowed, to a foot or two away, chattering his teeth fearfully. We knew
that any one who could magnetize so flighty and malicious a person as a
red squirrel, must be a magician, however simple he might be otherwise.
Aaron snapped his finger and the squirrel fled. “We'd better be movin',
Silvy.”

Silvia's tears flowed the faster, and the lines of trouble returned to
Aaron's face.

“Why don't she want to go home?” persisted Moses, stolidly.

We drew close beside them now and sat on the bank, Moses and I by Aaron,
Chub Leroy by Silvia. Chub was thoughtful. Silvia dried her eyes and
said with a gulp:

“It's pa.”

“That's it.” Aaron nodded and rubbed his sharp nose. “Old man Kincard,
it's him.”

They both looked at us trustfully. Moses saw no light in the matter.

“Who's he?”

“He's my father-in-law. He ain't goin' to like it. He's a sneezer. What
he don't like generally gets out of the way. My snakes! He 'll put Silvy
up the chimney and me in the stove, and he 'll light the fire.”

He chuckled and then relapsed into trouble. His emotions seemed to flit
across his face like sunbeams and shadows on a wall, leaving no trace
behind them, or each wiped out by the next.

“Snakes! We might just as well sit here.”

Silvia wept again. Moses's face admitted a certain surprise.

“What'll he do that for?”

While Aaron told their story, Silvia sometimes commented tearfully
on his left, Moses stolidly on his right, and the red squirrel with
excitement overhead; Chub and I were silent; the woods for the most part
kept still and listened too, with only a little sympathetic murmur of
leaves and tremble of sunbeam and shadow.

The Kincard place, it seemed, lay five miles away, down the north side
till you cleared the woods, and then eastward among the foothills. Old
Kincard's first name was James. And directly across the road stood the
four-roomed house where the Bees family once lived. It was “rickety
now and rented to rats.” The Bees family had always been absent-minded,
given to dying off and leaving things lying around. In that way Aaron
had begun early to be an orphan and to live with the Kincards. He was
supposed to own the old house and the dooryard in front of it, but the
rats never paid their rent, unless they paid it to the old man or the
cat; and Mr. Kincard had a low opinion of Aaron, as being a Bees, and
because he was built lengthwise instead of sidewise and knew more about
foxes than cows. It seemed to Aaron that a fox was in himself a more
interesting person; that this raising more potatoes than you could eat,
more tobacco than you could smoke, this making butter and cheese and
taking them to Wimberton weekly, and buying little except mortgages
and bank accounts, somewhere involved a mistake. A mortgage was an
arrangement by which you established strained relations with a neighbor,
a bank account something that made you suspicious of the bank. Now in
the woods one dealt for direct usefulness, comfort, and freedom of mind.
If a man liked to collect mortgages rather than fox-skins, it was the
virtue of the woods to teach tolerance; but Mr. Kincard's opinion of
Aaron was low and active. There was that difference between a Kincard
and a Bees point of view.

Aaron and Silvia grew up a few years apart on the old spread-out farm,
with the wooded mountainside heaving on the south and stretching east
and west. It was a neighborhood of few neighbors, and no village within
many miles, and the old man was not talkative commonly, though he'd open
up sometimes. Aaron and Silvia had always classed themselves together in
subdued opposition to their grim ruler of destiny. To each other they
called him “the old man,” and expressed by it a reverential but opposed
state of mind. To Aaron the undoubted parts of life were the
mountain-side of his pleasures and the level fields of his toil.
Wimberton was but a troubled glimpse now and then, an improbable memory
of more people and houses than seemed natural. Silvia tended to see
things first through Aaron's eyes, though she kept a basal judgment of
her own in reserve.

“He always licked us together since we was little,” said Aaron, looking
at Silvia with softly reminiscent eye. “It was two licks to me for
Silvy's one. That was square enough, and the old man thought so. When he
got set in a habit he'd never change. It was two to me for Silvy's one.”

Aaron told him, but a week now gone, that himself and Silvia would wish
to be married, and he seemed surprised. In fact he came at Aaron with
the hoe-handle, but could not catch him, any more than a lonesome
rabbit. Then he opened up astonishingly, and told Aaron of his low
opinion of him, which was more spread-out and full of details than you'd
expect. He wasn't going to give Aaron any such “holt on him as that,”
 with a guaranty deed, whatever that was, on eternity to loaf in, and he
set him the end of the week to clear out, to go elsewhere forever. To
Aaron's mind that was an absurd proposal. He wasn't going to do any
such foolishness. The rather he sold his collection of skins to a farmer
named Shore, and one morning borrowed a carpet bag and came over the
Cattle Ridge hand in hand with Silvia.

From Preston