Noble Ethan Crawford! we must pause a few moments before the career of this stalwart Jötun of the mountains, in the story of whose fortunes the savageness and hardships of the wilderness and the heroic qualities they nurse are shown in one picture. He was born in 1792. His early childhood was passed in a log hut a few miles from the Notch; and in his manhood, after a fire in 1818 had burned. the comfortable house on the Giant's Grave, he lived again in a log house with but one apartment and no windows. In 1819, he had built a rough house of a larger size, with a stone chimney, in which during the cold spells of winter, more than a cord of wood would be burned in twenty-four hours. He tells us that he never owned a hat, mittens, or shoes until he was thirteen years old; yet could harness and unharness horses in the biting winter weather with bare head, hands, and feet, "and not mind, or complain of the cold, as I was used to it." As to what is called comfort in the lowlands, he found that Naught the mountain yields thereof, He grew to be nearly seven feet in height, and rejoiced in a strength which he would show in lifting five hundred weight into a boat; in dragging a bear that he had muzzled to his house, that he might be tamed; or in carrying a buck home alive, upon his shoulders. What a flavor of wild mountain life, what vivid suggestions of the closest tug of man with nature,―of raw courage and muscle against frost and gale, granite and savageness, do we find in his adventures and exploits ;-his leaping from a load of hay in the Notch when a furious gust made it topple, and catching it on his shoulder to prevent it from falling over a precipice; his breaking out the road, for miles, through the wild winter drifts; his carrying the mail on his back, after freshets, to the next settlement, when a horse could not cross the streams; his climbings of Mount Washington with a party of adventurers, laden like a pack-horse, without suffering more fatigue than ordinary men would feel after a level walk of ten miles; his returns from the summit bearing some exhausted member of a party on his back; his long, lonely tramps, on snow-shoes, after moose, and his successful shooting of a pair of the noble beasts, two miles back of the Notch, about dark, and sleeping through the cold night in their warm skins, undismayed by the wolf howls that serenaded him! The tribe of bears in a circumference of twenty miles knew him well. Many a den he made desolate of its cubs by shaking them, like apples, from trees into which they would run to escape him; then tying his hankerchief around their mouths he would take them home under his arm to tame them. Many a wrestle did he have with full grown ones who would get their feet in his traps. Scarcely a week passed while he lived among the mountains which was not marked by some encounter with a bear. With the wolves also, he carried on a war of years. So long as he kept sheep he could not frighten the wolves into cessation of hostilities. The marauders showed the skill of a surgeon in their rapine and slaughter. Ethan found, now and then, a sheepskin a few rods from his house with no mark upon it except a smooth slit from the throat to the fore legs, as though it had been cut with a knife. The legs had been taken off as far as the lowest joint; all the flesh had been eaten out clean, and only the head and backbone had been left attached to the pelt. When the feat was accomplished, the wolves would give him notice by a joint howl, which the Washington range would echo from their "bleak concave," so that all the woods seemed filled with packs of the fierce pirates. Once in a December night four wolves made a descent upon his sheep, which fled among the carriages near the house, for safety. Ethan went out in his nightdress and faced them in the bright moonlight. He had no weapon, and so they rose on their haunches to hear what he might have to say. He harangued them, to little purpose for some time, and at last "observed to them that they had better make off with themselves," with the intimation that an axe or gun would be soon forthcoming. They then turned about and marched away, "giving us some of their lonesome music." But Ethan found, the next The banks Yet he had morning, that they had enjoyed his hospitality, by digging up carcasses of bears back of the stable, and gnawing them close to the bone. He thinned the sables from the region by his traps. of the neighboring brooks he depopulated of otters. an affection for all the creatures of the wilderness, and loved to have young wolves, and tame bucks, and well-behaved bears, and domesti cated sable, around his premises; while the collecting of rare alpine plants from the snowy edges of the ravines on the ridge, where Nature had "put them according to their merits," was "a beautiful employment, which I always engaged in with much pleasure." But his most remarkable adventures were his contests with the wild-cats, the fiercest animals which the mountains harbored. The hills that slope towards the Ammonoosuc were cleared by him of these furious freebooters, that made great havoc with his geese and sheep. His greatest exploit was his capture of one of these creatures in a tree within the Notch, by a lasso made of birch sticks, which he twisted on the spot. He slipped it over the wild-cat's neck, and jerked the animal down ten feet. The noose broke. He repaired it instantly, fastened it once more around the creature's head, pulled him down within reach, and after a severe battle, killed him. He seems to have possessed a magic fetter, like that which the dark elves of the Scandinavian myths wove to bind the wolf Fenrir, and which was plaited of six things into a cord smooth and soft as a silken string the beards of women, the noise of a cat's footfall, the roots of stones, the sinews of bears, the spittle of birds, and the breath of fish. What extremes in Ethan's experience! He entertained many of the wisest and most distinguished of the country under his rude roof, and was gratefully remembered for his hospitality, and his faithful service in guiding them to the great ridge. He would come home. from a bear-fight, to find in his house, perhaps, "a member of Congress, Daniel Webster," who desired his assistance on foot to the summit of Mount Washington. There was a couple whose talk would have been worth hearing! Ethan says that they went up "without meeting anything worthy of note, more than was common for me to find, but to him things appeared interesting. And when we arrived there, he addressed himself in this way, saying: 'Mount Washington, I have come a long distance, and have toiled hard to arrive at your summit, and now you give me a cold reception. I am extremely sorry, that I shall not have time enough to view this grand prospect which lies before me, and nothing prevents but the uncomfortable atmosphere in which you reside.'" How accurately Ethan reported the address, we cannot certify; but as the rostrum was the grandest, and the audience the smallest, which was ever honored with a formal speech by the great orator, the picture should not be lost. The snow from a sudden squall froze upon the pair as they descended the cone. The statesman was evidently interested in his guide, for Ethan says that, "the next morning, after paying his bill, he made me a handsome present of twenty dollars." And Ethan's life was perpetually set in remarkable contrasts. From struggles with wild-cats in the forests of Cherry Mountain, to the society of his patient, faithful, pious wife, was a distance as wide as can be indicated on the planet. Mount Washington looked down into his uncouth domicile, and saw there Sparta's stoutness, Bethlehem's heart. Lucy taught him how to meet calamity without despair and repining. When his house burned down, and left him with no property but one new cheese and the milk of the cows, his wife, though sick, was not despondent. When his debts, caused by this fire, pressed heavy, and he staggered under difficulties as he never did under the heaviest load in the forest, she assured him that Providence had some wise purpose in their trouble. When his crops were swept off, and his meadows filled with sand by freshets, Lucy's courage was not crushed. He knocked down a swaggering bully, once, on a musterfield in Lancaster, and was obliged to promise Lucy that he would never give way to an angry passion again. When death invaded their household, and his own powerful frame was so shaken by dis ease and pain, that a flash of lightning, as he said, seemed to run from his spine to the ends of his hair, his wife's religious patience and trust proved an undrainable cordial. And after he became weakened by sickness, if he staid out long after dark, Lucy would take a lantern and go into the woods to search for him. He was put into jail at last in Lancaster for debt. Lucy wrote a pleading letter to his chief creditor to release him, but without effect. This, says Ethan, "forced me, in the jail, to reflect on human nature, and it overcame me, so that I was obliged to call for the advice of physicians and a nurse." Other forms of adversity, too, beset him,opposition to his public-house when travellers became more plentiful, which destroyed his prospects of profit; the breaking of a bargain for the sale of his lands; foul defamation of his character to the postoffice authorities in Washington, from whom he held an appointment. Broken in health, oppressed by pecuniary burdens, and with shattered spirits, he left the plateau at the base of Mount Washington for a more pleasant home in Vermont, accompanied by Lucy, whose faith did not allow her to murmur. But he experienced hard fortune there, too, and returned to die, within sight of the range, an old man, before he had reached the age of fifty-six years. Since the breaking up of his home on the Giant's Grave, the mountains have heard no music which they have echoed so heartily as the windings of his horn, and the roar of the cannon which he used to load to the muzzle, that his guests might hear a park of artillery reply. Few men that have ever visited the mountains have done more faithful work or borne so much adversity and suffering. The cutting of his heel-cord with an axe, when he was chopping out the first path up Mount Washington, was a type of the result to himself of his years of toil in the wilderness; and his own quaint reflection on that wound, which inflicted lameness upon him for months, is the most appropriate inscription, after the simple words, "an honest man," that could be reared over his grave: "So it is that men suffer various ways in advancing civilization, and through God, mankind are indebted to the labors of men in many different spheres of |