though bent on some absorbing errand, he soon disappeared from the region, and has never since been seen."

On Wednesday evening suspicions of the safety of the family were carried down to Bartlett and North Conway, where Mr. Willey's father and brothers lived. But they were not credited. The terrible certainty was to be communicated to the father in the most thrilling way. At midnight of Wednesday, a messenger reached the bank of the river opposite his house in Lower Bartlett, but could not cross. He blew a trumpet, blast after blast. The noise and the mountain echoes startled the family and neighborhood from their repose. They soon gathered on the river bank, and heard the sad message shouted to them through the darkness.

On Thursday the 31st of August, the family and many neighbors were able to reach the Notch. Tall Ethan Crawford left his farm which the floods had ravaged, and went down through the Notch to meet them. "When I got there," he says, " on seeing the friends of that well-beloved family, and having been acquainted with them for many years, my heart was full and my tongue refused utterance, and I could not for a considerable length of time speak to one of them, and could only express my regards I had to them in pressing their hands—but gave full vent to tears. This was the second time my eyes were wet with tears since grown to manhood." Search was commenced at once for the buried bodies. The first that was exhumed was one of the hired men, David Allen, a man of powerful frame and remarkable strength. He was but slightly disfigured. He was found near the top of a pile of earth and shattered timbers with "hands clenched and full of broken sticks and small limbs of trees." Soon the bodies of Mrs. Willey and her husband were discoveredthe latter not so crushed that it could not be recognized.

No more could be found that day. Rude coffins were prepared, and the next day, Friday, about sunset, the simple burial-service was offered. Elder Samuel Hasaltine, standing amidst the company of strong, manly forms, whose faces were wet with tears, commenced the service with the words of Isaiah: "Who hath measured the

waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with a span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance." How fitting this language in that solemn pass, and how unspeakably more impressive must the words have seemed, when the mountains themselves took them up and literally responded them, joining as mourners in the burial liturgy! For the minister stood so that each one of these sublime words was given back by the echo, in a tone as clear and reverent as that in which they were uttered. We may easily believe that the "effect of all this was soul-stirring beyond description."

It

The next day the body of the youngest child, about three years old, was found, and also that of the other hired man. On Sunday, the eldest daughter was discovered, at a distance from the others, across the river. A bed was found on the ruins near her body. was supposed that she was drowned, as no bruise or mark was found upon her. She was twelve years old, and Ethan Crawford tells us "she had acquired a good education, and seemed more like a gentleman's daughter, of fashion and affluence, than the daughter of one who had located himself in the midst of the mountains." These were buried without any religious service. Three children,—a daughter and two sons, were never found.

It seems to us that nothing can interpret so effectively the terror of this tragedy as the connected statement of the simple facts so far as they are known. We are indebted for the facts to Rev. Benjamin Willey's interesting "Incidents in White Mountain History," and to the story of Ethan Crawford's life, now out of print. But the horror of that night to the doomed family,—who can imagine that? The glimpses given us of the fury of the storm, by the peril of Abel Crawford's family, and by the experience of the settlers that were tossed in their hut upon the flood of the Rocky Branch, furnish but faint coloring of the awfulness of the tempest, as the Willey family must have seen and felt it. About two years after, a man who had moved into the same house witnessed a thunder-tempest in the night,

which was not nearly so terrible as the storm of 1826, but which supplies us with better means of conceiving the tremendous passion of the elements amid which the Willey family were overwhelmed, and what must have been their consternation and despair. We are told that the "horror of great darkness" that filled the Notch would be dispelled by the blinding horror of lightning, that now and then kindled the vast gray wall of Mount Webster opposite the house, opened

The grisly gulfs and slaty rifts
Which seam its shiver'd head,

and showed the torrents that were hissing down its black shelves and frightful precipices. Next a rock, loosened by a stream or smitten by a thunderbolt, would leap down the wall, followed all the way by a trail of splendor that lighted the whole gorge, and waking a reverberating noise by its concussions, more frightful than the roar of the thunder, which seemed to make the very ground tremble. To this was added the rage of the river and the fury of the rain,--and all united to produce a dismay which we may well believe prevented the inmates from speaking for half an hour, and caused them" to stand and look at each other almost petrified with fear."

For several hours the Willey family were enveloped in

Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
Such groans of roaring wind and rain,

as flamed and roared in the storm that beat upon Lear. The father and mother, anxious for their young children, doubtless saw, with their mind's eye, that fearful land-slide of June more vividly than any horror which the lightning showed them on the walls of their gigantic prison. In every pause of the thunder they were straining to hear the more fearful sound of the grinding avalanche. And what must have been the concentrated agony and dread, when they heard the moving of the loosened ridge; heard nearer and nearer its accu mulating roar; heard, and saw perhaps, through one flaming sheet of the lightning, that it was rushing in the line of their little home;

and, unable to command their nerves, or hoping to outrun its-flood, rushed from their security into

The tyranny of the open night too rough

For nature to endure.

The relatives who studied the ground closely after the disaster, were unable to conjecture why the family could not have outrun the land-slide, or crossed its track, if they left the house as soon as they heard its descent far up the mountain. Some of them at least, they thought, should thus have been able to escape its devastation. Mr. James Willey informs us that the spirit of his brother appeared to him in a dream, and told him that the family left the house sometime before the avalanche, fearing to be drowned or floated off by the Saco, which had risen to their door. They fled back, he said, farther up the mountain to be safe against the peril of water, and thus, when the land-slide moved towards them, were compelled to run a greater distance to escape it than would have been required if they had staid in their home; while they would have been swept off by the flood, if they had kept the line of the road which could have conducted them out of the Notch. It is a singular fact, Mr. Benjamin Willey tells us, that this explanation accounts for more known features of the catastrophe than any other which has been formed. It explains why the eldest daughter was found without a bruise, as though she had been drowned; and also the fact that a bed was found near her body, with which certainly the family would not have encumbered themselves, if they had rushed from the house with the single hope of escaping destruction when the avalanche was near. It accounts for the appearance of the body of the hired man, who was first discovered. And, by connecting the terror of a sudden flood with the other horrors of the night, it brings the picture into harmony with what we know of the ravage and disaster along the line of the Saco below.

The Bible was open on the table in the Willey House when it was entered the next day. The family were then secure from the wrath of elements that desolate the earth. At what place could the book have been found open more fitting than the eighteenth psalm, to ex

press the horrors of the tempest and the deliverance which the spirit finds?" The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice; hailstones and coals of fire. Then the channels of waters were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered

at thy rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.

He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters. He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me."