As she stood on the banks of the river, feeling that her reason would forsake her from anguish, she suddenly heard one of the Indians ask her oldest daughter to sing. The girl stood speechless with amazement, not knowing what to do for a moment, and then there floated out through the vast solitudes of these lonely mountains a curiously fresh young voice, as the girl chanted the sublime words of the psalmist in the plaintive river-song.
There was a slight pause, and then Danny’s voice, sweet and clear, to the accompaniment of the soft strains of Tony’s violin, was heard as he chanted:
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yes, we wept,
when we remembered Zion.
“We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
“For there they that carried us away captive required of us a
song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth.”
Tony’s hands lovingly fingered his bow, and the music, like the rippling flow of the river Ellis, continued its sweet low murmur, as the little newsie told how the magic charm of these beautiful words must have touched some chord in the savage breasts, for, as the girl ceased, the fiercest Indian caught the babe gently from the mother’s arms and carried it across the river. One of his companions also softened, and, picking up another child, bore it safely over the stream.
Nathalie chose the familiar Willey story, about the family who lived in an inn on the side of Mount Willey, at the entrance to the great Notch. “In 1826,” said the girl, “one evening in June they heard a queer, rumbling noise, and hurried out to see an avalanche of stones and uprooted trees making its way with great speed down the mountain. Fortunately, before it reached the house it swerved one side, and the Willeys, believing it quite safe, returned to the house, and, as time passed on, carelessly forgot the warning that had been given them.
“In August a severe storm occurred, which raged with indescribable fury for a day and a night, the rain falling in sheets, while the Saco overflowed its banks, thus creating a state of general upheaval. Two days later, a tourist traveling through the Notch arrived at the inn, to find it uninjured, but deserted, with the exception of a half-starved dog who was whining dismally. He made his way to Bartlett, and the mountaineers, hurrying to the scene, finally discovered the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Willey and two hired men, who were buried in a mass of wreckage not far from the inn. The bodies of the children were never discovered.
“It is supposed,” explained Nathalie, “that they had all rushed out on again hearing the rumbling noises, and had evidently tried to seek the shelter of a cave near. But they were too late,” she ended with a pathetic sigh, “for the avalanche was upon them before they reached it. If they had only remained in the house they would have been saved.”
A little later, as Philip and Van became engaged in a conversation about the war, a topic of which they never seemed to weary, Nathalie and Nita, with arms intertwined in long-cemented camaraderie, wandered to the high, jutting rock which Nathalie called “Heaven’s window.” Here in awed silence they gazed at the faraway, scintillating blue peaks, huge escarpments, and yawning mountain crevasses towering above the alpine meadow, that, rich in many shades of verdure, darkened with cloud-shadows, and cut with ribbon-like trails of forest foliage, were a
“Wondrous woof of various greens.”
In the sun-dyed splendor it was like a cloth of gold, a wondrous tapestry woven by Nature in her most majestic mood, a picture that held them with the calm of its infinite beauty.