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- 2026-01-30T07:57:45.581Z
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- 3714
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- THE TARTARUS OF MAIDS
It lies not far from Woedolor Mountain in New England. Turning to the
east, right out from among bright farms and sunny meadows, nodding in
early June with odorous grasses, you enter ascendingly among bleak
hills. These gradually close in upon a dusky pass, which, from the
violent Gulf Stream of air unceasingly driving between its cloven walls
of haggard rock, as well as from the tradition of a crazy spinster's
hut having long ago stood somewhere hereabout, is called the Mad Maid's
Bellows'-pipe.
Winding along at the bottom of the gorge is a dangerously narrow
wheel-road, occupying the bed of a former torrent. Following this road
to its highest point, you stand as within a Dantean gateway. From
the steepness of the walls here, their strangely ebon hue, and the
sudden contraction of the gorge, this particular point is called the
Black Notch. The ravine now expandingly descends into a great, purple,
hopper-shaped hollow, far sunk among many Plutonian, shaggy-wooded
mountains. By the country people this hollow is called the Devil's
Dungeon. Sounds of torrents fall on all sides upon the ear. These rapid
waters unite at last in one turbid, brick-colored stream, boiling
through a flume among enormous boulders. They call this strange-colored
torrent Blood River. Gaining a dark precipice it wheels suddenly to
the west, and makes one maniac spring of sixty feet into the arms of a
stunted wood of gray-haired pines, between which it thence eddies on
its further way down to the invisible lowlands.
Conspicuously crowning a rocky bluff high to one side, at the
cataract's verge, is the ruin of an old saw-mill, built in those
primitive times when vast pines and hemlocks superabounded throughout
the neighboring region. The black-mossed bulk of those immense,
rough-hewn, and spike-knotted logs, here and there tumbled all
together, in long abandonment and decay, or left in solitary, perilous
projection over the cataract's gloomy brink, impart to this rude wooden
ruin not only much of the aspect of one of rough-quarried stone, but
also a sort of feudal, Rhineland, and Thurmberg look, derived from the
pinnacled wildness of the neighborhood scenery.
Not far from the bottom of the Dungeon stands a large whitewashed
building, relieved, like some great white sepulchre, against the
sullen background of mountain-side firs, and other hardy evergreens,
inaccessibly rising in grim terraces for some two thousand feet.
The building is a paper-mill.
Having embarked on a large scale in the seedsman's business (so
extensively and broadcast, indeed, that at length my seeds were
distributed through all the Eastern and Northern States, and even fell
into the far soil of Missouri and the Carolinas), the demand for paper
at my place became so great, that the expenditure soon amounted to a
most important item in the general account. It need hardly be hinted
how paper comes into use with seedsmen, as envelopes. These are mostly
made of yellowish paper, folded square; and when filled, are all but
flat, and being stamped, and superscribed with the nature of the seeds
contained, assume not a little the appearance of business letters
ready for the mail. Of these small envelopes I used an incredible
quantity--several hundred of thousands in a year. For a time I had
purchased my paper from the wholesale dealers in a neighboring town.
For economy's sake, and partly for the adventure of the trip, I now
resolved to cross the mountains, some sixty miles, and order my future
paper at the Devil's Dungeon paper-mill.
The sleighing being uncommonly fine toward the end of January, and
promising to hold so for no small period, in spite of the bitter cold
I started one gray Friday noon in my pung, well fitted with buffalo
and wolf robes; and, spending one night on the road, next noon came in
sight of Woedolor Mountain.
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