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- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.985Z
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- 7566
- text
- II. 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 hereabouts, 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-coloured stream, boiling
through a flume among enormous boulders. They call this strange-coloured
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 neighbouring
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
neighbouring scenery.
Not far from the bottom of the Dungeon stands a large whitewashed
building, relieved, like some great whited 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 hundreds of thousands in a year. For a time I had
purchased my paper from the wholesale dealers in a neighbouring 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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