But we have not space to mention one-half the charms that await them in the Gap. If they have eyes to distinguish between the flutter of wings and loose hanging mosses, they may behold, at evening, the national bald-eagle soaring among his native cliffs, and winging to his perch on the far-up old hemlock, where they may see his reverend white head gleaming like a snow-flake among the leaves, until the wail of the whippoorwill calls the shadows of night over the whole mountain. Besides all this, and the other charms too tedious to mention, if they commend themselves to the favour of mine host, they will be roused up in the morning by the roar of a waterfall under their very pillows, and then, leaping into a boat, and rowing into the river, they may survey it at their ease,--as lovely a sheet of foam, rushing over a cliff an hundred and forty feet high, as was ever stolen from its bed of beauty to drive----_'Eheu! eheu conditionem hujus temporis!'_----the machinery of--a saw-mill. THE HAWKS OF HAWK-HOLLOW. CHAPTER I. What man that sees the ever-whirling wheele Of Change, the which all mortall thing doth sway, But that thereby doth find, and plainly feele, How Mutability in them doth play Her cruel sports to many men's decay. SPENSER--_Faerie Queene_. America is especially the land of change. From the moment of discovery, its history has been a record of convulsions, such as necessarily attend a transition from barbarism to civilization; and to the end of time, it will witness those revolutions in society, which arise in a community unshackled by the restraints of prerogative. As no law of primogeniture can ever entail the distinctions meritoriously won, or the wealth painfully amassed, by a single individual, upon a line of descendants, the mutations in the condition of families will be perpetual. The Dives of to-day will be the Diogenes of to-morrow; and the 'man of the tub' will often live to see his children change place with those of the palace-builder. As it has been, so will it be,-- "Now up, now doun, as boket in a well;" and the honoured and admired of one generation will be forgotten among the moth-lived luminaries of the next. That American labours under a melancholy infatuation, who hopes, in the persons of his progeny, to preserve the state and consideration he has acquired for himself. He cannot bequeath, along with lands and houses, the wisdom and good fortune which obtained them; nor can he devise preventives against the natural consequences of folly and waste. His edifice of pride must crumble to dust, when both corner-stone and hypogeum are based upon the contingencies of expectation; and the funeral-stone and the elm of his family mausoleum will vanish, in course of time, before the axe and plough of a new proprietor.