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Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864

"Passages from the American Notebooks, Volume 1"

The walls present a specimen of how Nature packs the
stone, crowding huge masses, as it were, into chinks and fissures, and
here we see it in the perpendicular or horizontal layers, as Nature laid
it.

September 9th.--A walk yesterday forenoon through the Notch, formed
between Saddle Mountain and another adjacent one. This Notch is
otherwise called the Bellowspipe, being a long and narrow valley, with a
steep wall on either side. The walls are very high, and the fallen
timbers lie strewed adown the precipitous descent. The valley gradually
descends from the narrowest part of the Notch, and a stream of water
flows through the midst of it, which, farther onward in its course, turns
a mill. The valley is cultivated, there being two or three farm-houses
towards the northern end, and extensive fields of grass beyond, where
stand the hay-mows of last year, with the hay cut away regularly around
their bases. All the more distant portion of the valley is lonesome
in the extreme; and on the hither side of the narrowest part the
land is uncultivated, partly overgrown with forest, partly used as
sheep-pastures, for which purpose it is not nearly so barren as
sheep-pastures usually are.


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