FOOTPATHS 215 
more sacred depths the wood thrush chants his 
litany and the brown mountain butterflies hover 
among the scented vines. Higher yet rises the 
“Rattlesnake Ledge,” spreading over one side 
of the summit a black avalanche of broken 
rock, now overgrown with reindeer-moss and 
filled with tufts of the smaller wild geranium. 
Just below this ledge, —amid a dark, dense 
track of second-growth forest, masked here and 
there with grapevines, studded with rare or- 
chises, and pierced by a brook that vanishes 
suddenly where the ground sinks away and lets 
the blue distance in, —there is a little monu- 
ment to which the footpath leads, and which 
always seemed to me as wild a memorial of for- 
gotten superstition as the traveller can find 
amid the forests of Japan. 
It was erected by a man called Solomon Par- 
sons, residing near Worcester, a quiet, thought- 
ful farmer, long-bearded, low-voiced, and with 
that aspect of refinement which an ideal life 
brings forth even in quite uninstructed men. 
At the height of the “ Second Advent ” excite- 
ment this man resolved to build for himself 
upon these remote rocks a house which should 
escape the wrath to come, and should even 
endure amid a burning and transformed earth. 
Thinking, as he had once said to me, that, “if 
the First Dispensation had been strong enough 
