The next day the weather cleared up, and we made a trip of two miles
over a rough mountain trail to Lake Avalanche, whose rocky and
precipitous walls form a fit christening bowl, or baptistery-font for
the infant Hudson.
Returning to Camp Colden and resuming our western march, two miles
brought us to Calamity Pond, where a lone monument marks the spot of
David Henderson's death, by the accidental discharge of a pistol. Five
miles from this point brought us to the "Deserted Village," or the
Upper Adirondack Iron Works, with houses and furnaces abandoned,
and rapidly falling into decay. Here we found a cheery fireside and
cordial welcome.
* * *
All the sad story of forest and flower,
All the red glory of sunsetting hour,
Comes till I seem to lie lapped in bright dreams
Lulled by the lullaby murmur of streams.
_James Kennedy._
* * *
Had I time to picture this level, grass-grown street, with ten or
fifteen square box-looking houses, windowless, empty and desolate; a
school-house with its long vacation of twenty-three years; a bank with
heavy shutters and ponderous locks, whose floor, Time, the universal
burglar, had undermined; two large furnaces with great rusty wheels,
whose occupation was gone forever; a thousand tons of charcoal,
untouched for a quarter of a century; thousands of bricks waiting for a
builder; a real haunted house, whose flapping clap-boards contain
more spirits than the Black Forests of Germany--a village so utterly
desolate, that it has not even the vestige of a graveyard--if I could
picture to you this village, as it appeared to me that weird midnight,
lying so quiet,
"under the light of the solemn moon,"
you would realize as I did then, that truth is indeed stranger than
fiction, and that Goldsmith in _his_ "Deserted Village" had not
overdrawn the description of desolate Auburn.
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