"My dog brought me yesterday the first intelligence that she was here.
He returned from his morning ramble with a string of wampum about his
neck, which had the mark of the tribe. He was her gift," he added,
patting the head of the dog and looking with a softened expression at
Nunu, who drooped her head upon her bosom and walked on in tears.
* * * * *
The chain of the Green Mountains, after a gallop of some five hundred
miles from Canada to Connecticut, suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long
Island Sound, and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pine-trees,
three hundred feet in air, as if checked in midcareer by the sea.
Standing on the brink of this bold precipice, you have the bald face of
the rock in a sheer perpendicular below you; and, spreading away from
the broken masses at its foot, lies an emerald meadow inlaid with a
crystal and rambling river, across which, at a distance of a mile or
two, rise the spires of the university from what else were a thick
serried wilderness of elms. Back from the edge of the precipice extends
a wild forest of hemlock and fir, ploughed on its northern side by a
mountain torrent, whose bed of marl, dry and overhung with trees in the
summer, serves as a path and guide from the plain to the summit. It were
a toilsome ascent but for that smooth and hard pavement, and the
impervious and green thatch of pine-tassels overhung.
The kind mistress ascended with the assistance of my arm, and St. John
drew stoutly between Miss Temple and a fat young lady with an incipient
asthma. Nunu had not been seen since the first cluster of hanging
flowers had hidden her from our sight as she bounded upward.
The hour or two of slanting sunshine, poured in upon the summit of the
precipice from the west, had been sufficient to induce a fine and silken
moss to show its fibres and small blossoms above the carpet of
pine-tassels, and, emerging from the brown shadow of the wood, you stood
on a verdant platform, the foliage of sighing trees overhead, a fairies'
velvet beneath you, and a view below, that you may as well (if you would
not die in your ignorance) make a voyage to see.
We found Nunu lying thoughtfully near the brink of the precipice and
gazing off over the waters of the sound, as if she watched the coming or
going of a friend under the white sails that glanced upon its bosom. We
recovered our breath in silence, I alone perhaps of that considerable
company gazing with admiration at the lithe and unconscious figure of
grace lying in the attitude of the Grecian hermaphrodite on the brow of
the rock before us. Her eyes were moist, and motionless with
abstraction, her lips just perceptibly curved in an expression of
mingled pride and sorrow, her small hand buried and clenched in the
moss, and her left foot and ankle, models of spirited symmetry, escaped
carelessly from her dress, the high instep strained back, as if
recovering from a leap with the tense control of emotion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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