In the afternoon, while walking down the road to Shelburne, I met an apparently honest farmer, with whom I held some discourse. He was curious about the great city he had known half a century before, when it was in swaddling clothes; I about the mountains above and around us, that had never known change since the world began. An amiable contest ensued, in which each tried to lead the other to talk of the topic most interesting to himself. The husbandman grew eloquent upon his native State and its great man. “But what,” I insisted, “do you think of your greatest mountain there?” pointing to the splendid peak.
“Oh, drat the mountains! I never look at ‘em. Ask the old woman.”
Some enticing views may be had from the Shelburne intervales, embracing Madison on the right, and Washington on the left. It is, therefore, permitted to steal an occasional look back until we reach the Lead Mine Bridge, and stand over the middle of the flashing Androscoggin.
The dimpled river, broad here, and showing tufts of foliage on its satin surface, recedes between wooded banks to the middle distance, where it disappears. Swaying to and fro, without noise, the lithe and slender willows on the margin continually dipped their budding twigs in the stream, as if to show its clear transparency, while letting fall, drop by drop, its crystal globules. They gently nodded their green heads, keeping time to the low music of the river.
Beyond the river, over gently meeting slopes of the valley, two magnificent shapes, Washington and Madison, rose grandly. Those truly regal summits still wore their winter ermine. They were drawn so widely apart as to show the familiar peaks of Mount Clay protruding between them. It is hardly possible to imagine a more beautiful picture of mountain scenery. Noble river, hoary summits, blanched precipices, over whose haggard visages a little color was beginning to steal, eloquently appealed to every perception of the beautiful and the sublime. Much as the view from this point is extolled, it can hardly be over-praised. True, it exhibits the same objects that we see from Berlin and Milan; but the order of arrangement is not only reversed, but so altered as to render any comparison impossible. In this connection it may be remarked that a short removal usually changes the whole character of a mountain landscape. No two are precisely alike.
The annals of Shelburne, which originally included Gorham within its limits, are sufficiently meagre; but they furnish the same story of struggle with hardship—often with danger—common to the early settlements in this region. Shelburne was settled, just before the breaking out of the Revolution, by a handful of adventurous pioneers, who were attacked in 1781 by a prowling band of hostile Indians. This incursion is memorable as one of the last recorded in the long series going back into the first decade of the New England colonies. It was one of the boldest. The histories place the number of Indians at only six. After visiting Bethel, where they captured three white men, and Gilead, where they killed another, they entered Shelburne. Here they killed and scalped Peter Poor, and took a negro prisoner. Such was the terror inspired by this audacious onset, that the inhabitants, making no defence, fled, panic-struck, to Hark Hill, where they passed the night, leaving the savages to plunder the village at their leisure. The next day the refugees continued their flight, stopping only when they reached Fryeburg, fifty-nine miles from the scene of disaster.
Before taking leave of the Androscoggin Valley, which is an opulent picture-gallery, and where at every step one finds himself arrested before some masterpiece of Nature, the traveller is strongly advised to continue his journey to Bethel, the town next below Shelburne. Bethel is one of the loveliest and dreamiest of mountain nooks. Its expanses of rich verdure, its little steeple, emerging from groves of elm-trees, its rustic bridge spanning the tireless river, its air of lethargy and indolence, captivate eye and mind; and to eyes tired with the hardness and glare of near mountains, the distant peaks become points of welcome repose.
VII.
ASCENT BY THE CARRIAGE-ROAD.
Where the huge mountain rears his brow sublime,
On which no neighboring height its shadow flings,
Led by desire intense the steep I climb.
Petrarch.