bank of which they were to pass the night. There was but one of their
number, perhaps, who had become so estranged from natural sympathies
by the absorbing spell of the pursuit as to acknowledge no
satisfaction at the sight of human faces in the remote and solitary
region whither they had ascended. A vast extent of wilderness lay
between them and the nearest settlement, while scant a mile above
their heads was that bleak verge where the hills throw off their
shaggy mantle of forest-trees and either robe themselves in clouds or
tower naked into the sky. The roar of the Amonoosuck would have been
too awful for endurance if only a solitary man had listened while the
mountain-stream talked with the wind.

[Footnote 1: The Indian tradition on which this somewhat extravagant
tale is founded is both too wild and too beautiful to be adequately
wrought up in prose. Sullivan, in his history of Maine, written since
the Revolution, remarks that even then the existence of the Great
Carbuncle was not entirely discredited.]

The adventurers, therefore, exchanged hospitable greetings and
welcomed one another to the hut where each man was the host and all
were the guests of the whole company. They spread their individual
supplies of food on the flat surface of a rock and partook of a
general repast; at the close of which a sentiment of good-fellowship
was perceptible among the party, though repressed by the idea that the
renewed search for the Great Carbuncle must make them strangers again
in the morning. Seven men and one young woman, they warmed themselves
together at the fire, which extended its bright wall along the whole
front of their wigwam. As they observed the various and contrasted
figures that made up the assemblage, each man looking like a
caricature of himself in the unsteady light that flickered over him,