Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 6.djvu/338

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3°4

��THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

��thither, and walked down nearly a mile. Close to the brow we climbed the wall, and under spreading chestnut trees we followed the path through dead leaves and over emerald moss, until we reached the "upper fall," where Purgatory begins. The brook above the fall is about three feet wide, running over a bed of almost solid rock. Where the fall commences the rock rises about two feet from the water, then through a gorge, but little over a foot in width, in the solid rock, the water plunges foaming and fretting down a sheer precipice of one solid rock, some thirty feet into a pool below, about twenty feet across in its widest part. A path leads down beside the fall to the basin below, and generally careful stepping will take one on the stones in the pool under the precipice, the water being shallow. The rock is in the form of half a horse-shoe, about thirty feet high and fifty feet around. Ferns were growing in the crevices, and a fungi of a kind unknown to me looking as if carved from wax. Visitors had deposited cards in the crevices, and names were carved high up on the rock. A young man discharged a pistol, and the report was almost deaf- ening. On the top of the precipice is a hole in the rock called the " Devil's Footprint ;" and a hollow in which seven persons can stand comfortably,

��it being seven feet deep, is called the " Devil's Bean-pot." A young girl jumped from this rock into the basin beneath because of a faithless lover, and the spot bears the name of the " Lover's Leap."

Following the path over the loveliest mosses, jumping in places, clinging to overhanging branches, and swinging ourselves from rock to rock, creeping along on the shelving, slippery edges of others, panting and weary, we reached the lower fall. The brook broadens here, and a huge flat rock reaches from shore to shore. The edges of the rocks were fairly carpeted with fern moss in which tiny stones were lodged. The water falls over this rock in one smooth unbroken sheet about four feet into a wild gorge full of bowlders, where it fusses and fumes and hurries its way down the hill. Trees of gigantic growth so cover this spot that the sun seldom penetrates to the brook below. Mag- nificent forest kings are rotting because it is impossible to draw them here.

Words can not describe the wild beauty of these falls ; we visited them again and again, and they never lost their charm for me. We always found something new to admire, something to add to our stock of treasures, which we were to take home with us as a re- minder of my vacation.

Elm Farm, Hudson, N. H.

��ADDENDA.

��Pennsylvania, late in last February, placed her first contribution in the National Hall of Statuary, the statue of Robert Fulton, who was born in Little Britain, now Fulton, Lancaster county, Penn., in 1765, and died in New York February 24, 18 15 ; the great inventor whom DeWitt Clinton called the " Ar- chimedes of his country" — the one private citizen for whom the legislature of that state ordered mourning worn for some weeks. The figure differs

��from all in the hall, as the first in a seden- tary position, as also the first to bring to honor there the mechanic's work and dress (elegant undress rather), the coat being thrown aside, and the full ruffled shirt-sleeves turned back upon the sinewy wrists.

Sitting cornerwise in the wide square framed, stuffed and fringed arm-chair, the left shoulder about in the middle of the back, the extended hands hold by the ends a nude model, some 1 8 or

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