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- 5959
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 5905
- text
- while to publish it abroad. So that in real truth, they might have seen
it, and yet afterward have forgotten so inconsiderable a circumstance.
In short, this wondrous Memnon Stone could be no Memnon Stone to them;
nothing but a huge stumbling-block, deeply to be regretted as a vast
prospective obstacle in the way of running a handy little cross-road
through that wild part of the Manor.
Now one day while reclining near its flank, and intently eying it, and
thinking how surprising it was, that in so long-settled a country he
should have been the first discerning and appreciative person to light
upon such a great natural curiosity, Pierre happened to brush aside
several successive layers of old, gray-haired, close cropped, nappy
moss, and beneath, to his no small amazement, he saw rudely hammered in
the rock some half-obliterate initials--"S. ye W." Then he knew, that
ignorant of the stone, as all the simple country round might
immemorially have been, yet was not himself the only human being who had
discovered that marvelous impending spectacle: but long and long ago, in
quite another age, the stone had been beheld, and its wonderfulness
fully appreciated--as the painstaking initials seemed to testify--by
some departed man, who, were he now alive, might possibly wag a beard
old as the most venerable oak of centuries' growth. But who,--who in
Methuselah's name,--who might have been this "S. ye W?" Pierre
pondered long, but could not possibly imagine; for the initials, in
their antiqueness, seemed to point to some period before the era of
Columbus' discovery of the hemisphere. Happening in the end to mention
the strange matter of these initials to a white-haired old gentleman,
his city kinsman, who, after a long and richly varied, but unfortunate
life, had at last found great solace in the Old Testament, which he was
continually studying with ever-increasing admiration; this white-haired
old kinsman, after having learnt all the particulars about the
stone--its bulk, its height, the precise angle of its critical
impendings, and all that,--and then, after much prolonged cogitation
upon it, and several long-drawn sighs, and aged looks of hoar
significance, and reading certain verses in Ecclesiastes; after all
these tedious preliminaries, this not-at-all-to-be-hurried white-haired
old kinsman, had laid his tremulous hand upon Pierre's firm young
shoulder, and slowly whispered--"Boy; 'tis Solomon the Wise." Pierre
could not repress a merry laugh at this; wonderfully diverted by what
seemed to him so queer and crotchety a conceit; which he imputed to the
alledged dotage of his venerable kinsman, who he well knew had once
maintained, that the old Scriptural Ophir was somewhere on our northern
sea-coast; so no wonder the old gentleman should fancy that King Solomon
might have taken a trip--as a sort of amateur supercargo--of some Tyre
or Sidon gold-ship across the water, and happened to light on the Memnon
Stone, while rambling about with bow and quiver shooting partridges.
But merriment was by no means Pierre's usual mood when thinking of this
stone; much less when seated in the woods, he, in the profound
significance of that deep forest silence, viewed its marvelous
impendings. A flitting conceit had often crossed him, that he would like
nothing better for a head-stone than this same imposing pile; in which,
at times, during the soft swayings of the surrounding foliage, there
seemed to lurk some mournful and lamenting plaint, as for some sweet boy
long since departed in the antediluvian time.
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