EXPLORATIONS AMONG THE WHITE MOUNTAINS. 75 



The fire which destroyed his buildings left him heavily oppressed by 

 debts, a burden which he was never able to throw off. His crops were 

 swept away, and his meadows filled with sand by freshets. Other forms 

 of adversity, too, beset him. Before middle life, his own powerful frame 

 was so shaken by disease and pain that a flash of lightning, he would 

 sometimes say, seemed to run from his spine to the ends of his hair. But 

 the example of his wife taught him how to meet calamity and distress 

 without despair and repining. He was put in jail at last, in Lancaster, 

 for debt. She wrote a pleading letter to his chief creditor to release him, 

 but without effect. "This," says Ethan, "forced me, in the jail, to reflect 

 on human nature, and it overcame me so that I was obliged to call for the 

 advice of physicians and a nurse." Broken in health, oppressed by 

 pecuniary burdens, and with shattered spirits, he left the plateau at the 

 base of Mt. Washington for a more pleasant home in Vermont. But 

 he experienced hard fortune there, too, and returned to die within sight 

 of the range, an old man, before he had reached the age of fifty-six years. 



" Since the breaking up of his home at the Giant's grave," says T. Starr 

 King, "the mountains have heard no music which they have echoed so 

 heartily as the windings of his horn, and the roar of the cannon which he 

 used to load to the muzzle, that his guests might hear a park of artillery 

 reply. Few men that have ever visited the mountains have done more 

 faithful work, or borne so much adversity and suffering. The cutting of 

 his heel-cord with an axe, when he was chopping out the first path up Mt. 

 Washington, was a t3^e of the result to himself of his years of toil in 

 the wilderness; and his own quaint reflection on that wound, which 

 inflicted lameness upon him for months, is the most appropriate inscrip- 

 tion, — after the simple words, 'an honest man,' — that could be reared over 

 his grave : — ' So it is that men suffer various ways in advancing civiliza- 

 tion ; and, through God, mankind are indebted to the labors of men in 

 many different spheres of life.'" 



At about the same time with the settlement of the Crawfords, a 

 tract of land three miles below the mouth of the notch was first 

 improved by a Mr. Davies ; this was the farm afterwards occupied by 

 Mr. Willey. In describing his second visit to this place. President 

 Dwight has preserved a record of one of the great fires which have 

 devastated the mountains of the notch. "When we entered upon this 



