A few years ago, while on a tramp through the North Woods, I came out through the forests of North Elba, to the old "John Brown Farm." Here John Brown lived for many years, and here he tried to establish a colony of freed slaves in the pure air of the mountains. Here, too, his family remained through the stirring times when he took part in the bloody struggles that made and kept Kansas free.
The little old brown farmhouse stands on the edge of the great woods, a few miles to the north of the highest peaks of the Adirondacks. There is nothing unusual about the house. You will find a dozen such in a few hours' walk almost anywhere in the mountain parts of New England or New York. It stands on a little hill, "in a sightly place," as they say in that region, with no shelter of trees around it.
[Illustration: The John Brown Homestead, North Elba, N.Y.]
At the foot of the hill in a broad curve flows the River Au Sable, small and clear and cold, and full of trout. It is not far above that the stream takes its rise in the dark Indian Pass, the only place in these mountains where the ice of winter lasts all summer long. The same ice on the one side sends forth the Au Sable, and on the other feeds the fountain head of the infant Hudson River.
In the little dooryard in front of the farmhouse is the historic spot where John Brown's body still lies moldering. There is not even a grave of his own. His bones lie with those of his father, and the short record of his life and death is crowded on the foot of his father's tombstone. Near by, in the little yard, lies a huge, wandering boulder, torn off years ago by the glaciers from the granite hills that hem in Indian Pass. The boulder is ten feet or more in diameter, large enough to make the farmhouse behind it seem small in comparison. On its upper surface, in letters two feet long, which can be read plainly for a mile away, is cut the simple name—
JOHN BROWN.
This is John Brown's grave, and the place, the boulder; and the inscription are alike fitting to the man he was.
