CHAPTER V.

AN OLD-FASHIONED DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER.

It was a comfort to get to a place with something like society, with
residences which had pretensions to elegance, with people of some
breeding, with a newspaper, and "stores" to advertise in it, and with two
or three churches to keep each other alive by wholesome agitation.
Rockland was such a place.

Some of the natural features of the town have been described already. The
Mountain, of course, was what gave it its character, and redeemed it from
wearing the commonplace expression which belongs to ordinary
country-villages. Beautiful, wild, invested with the mystery which
belongs to untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to give it
dignity, it had yet closer relations with the town over which it brooded
than the passing stranger knew of. Thus, it made a local climate by
cutting off the northern winds and holding the sun's heat like a
garden-wall. Peachtrees, which, on the northern side of the mountain,
hardly ever came to fruit, ripened abundant crops in Rockland.

But there was still another relation between the mountain and the town at
its foot, which strangers were not likely to hear alluded to, and which
was oftener thought of than spoken of by its inhabitants. Those
high-impending forests,--"hangers," as White of Selborne would have
called them,--sloping far upward and backward into the distance, had
always an air of menace blended with their wild beauty. It seemed as if
some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy robe over the bare,
precipitous flanks of the rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide