The people of this region looked upon his journeys through their valley with curiosity in those early days. The houses were more numerous then than now in the extreme southern portion of the valley. This region has been purchased by the North Adams Water Company, which has removed all dwellings above the reservoir. The last house in The Notch to-day is on the Walden Farm, at Greylock Park Gate. Hawthorne found, in the Highlands-of-the-Hoosac, the originals of many characters described in his works. “Eustace Bright,” of _Wonder-Book_, was a student of Williams; and the _Tanglewood Tales_ have made the whole world familiar with “rough, broken, rugged, headlong Berkshire.” Here, in the seclusion of The Bellows-Pipe, “where it slopes upward to the skies,” Hawthorne loved best to come. There he could look southward over the vast fields of Berkshire’s valleys to the distant crags of Bryant’s “Monument Mountain,” immortalized as the “headless sphinx” of his own _Wonder-Book_. And from the northern Notch, he looked away to the blue Domes of the White Mountains, a distance of sixty miles or more. The Limekilns along the Ashuilticook—the south branch of the Hoosac—still are smoking, as when Hawthorne and Mr. Leach visited them in 1838. The tale of _Ethan Brand_ was suggested by the legend of an insane creature who threw himself in at the open gate of the burning kiln. Their open iron doors in the mountainside at night seem like yawning mouths of Tartarus. Hawthorne met here also his “Bertram,” who figures in the story; while “the boy Joe,” son of “Bertram, the lime-burner,” was a bar-room lad observed at the “Whig Tavern” in North Adams. Daniel Haines, then living in a desolate hut in “Willow Dell,” was formerly nicknamed in the village as “Black Hawk,” and is described in _Ethan Brand_ as “Lawyer Giles,” the “elderly ragmuffin,” who—with the rest of the lazy regiment from the town tavern—came in response to the summons of “boy Joe” to see poor Brand returned from his long “search after the Unpardonable Sin.” The title of this story was the name of one of the prose master’s Salem acquaintances.