assembled to seek strength of arm, hardness of heart, cunning of brain,
for its warriors, in solemn incantations and offerings to the Unknown.
Here hostile prisoners had been tortured and burned. Some mishap or omen
or shift of superstitious feeling had led to the abandonment of this
council place. Even the trail, winding its tortuous way from the Valley
over the hills toward the Adirondack fastnesses, had been deserted for
another long before--so long, in fact, that the young brave who chanced to
follow the lounging tracks of the black bear down the creek to the gorge,
or who turned aside from the stealthy pursuit of the eagle's flight to
learn what this muffled roar might signify, looked upon the remains of the
council fire's circle of stone seats above the cataract, and down into the
chasm of mist and foam underneath, with no knowledge that they were a part
of his ancestral history.

Mr. Stewart told me that when he first settled in the Valley, a
disappointed and angry man, this gulf had much the satisfaction for him
that men in great grief or wrath find in breasting a sharp storm. There
was something congenial to his ugly unrest in this place, with its violent
clamor, its swift dashing of waters, its dismal shadows, and damp
chilliness of depths.

But we were fallen now upon calmer, brighter days. He was no longer the
discouraged, sullen misanthropist, but had come to be instead a pacific,
contented, even happy, gentleman. And lo! the meaning of the wild gorge
changed to reflect his mood. There was no stain of savagery upon the
delight we had in coming to this spot. As he said, once listened rightly
to, the music of the falling waters gave suggestions which, if they were
sobering, were still not sad.

This place was all our own, and hither we most frequently bent our steps