LETTER XII.

DEAR FRANK,

I HAVE now plenty of leisure of evenings; for Oliver has lately buried himself in Monsieur Cuvier's Golgotha, where he appears to be making a mighty shaking among the dry bones. It will probably not be long before he comes out upon me, with a head full of fossils, bones, and petrifactions, philosophizing upon them, as Hamlet moralizes upon poor Yorick's skull. In pursuing these studies he generally leaves me to myself, and my amusement is then to write you just what is uppermost. You must, therefore, forgive me, if I write without connexion, and sometimes put you out of patience.

If I remember right, I left off my last somewhere about the foot of the Blue Ridge. After this our ride lay along the banks of the Shenandoah, which commences its course northwardly, close by where some of the branches of James river begin their course to the south. They divide the waters of this great valley between them, and bear them through the Blue Ridge, the first in conjunction with the Potomac, the latter by itself. It was a pleasant ride along the foot of the mountain, sometimes crossing the little river, at others trotting on its banks, skirted with lofty elms. To the right was the mountain, to the left the

far-spreading valley, spotted with fine farms, and bounded on the west by another ridge of blue hills.

In the days of classical romance or Gothic superstition, when every grove, and stream, and lonely hill was peopled by nymphs, river-gods, dryads, fairies, and other queer curmudgeons, some of them of tolerable reputation, and others no better than they should be, this fair pastoral region would have been all alive with these small people. But, in this age of stern philosophy, the sprightly gambols of imagination are repressed by the trammels of science, and these airy creations of fear or fancy chased from their wonted haunts by cross old fellows, who explore the country to look for stones and minerals, or spy out the proper location of a canal or rail-road. The rivers produce nothing but fish; the groves are only peopled with squirrels and woodpeckers; and the mountains contain no beings allied to poetry or romance, but the wild deer, and the huntsman equally wild.

The only authentic account of the appearance or agency of a fairy in our country, which I have ever met with, is in a letter in my possession, which I cherish as a great curiosity. You may recollect that during the last war, there was a great scarcity of flints in our army, and that a learned physician and philosopher, of New-York, was deputed to go in search of them, in the state of New-Jersey, where it was reported they were to be found in great quantities. In the performance of this duty he encountered the singular adventure related as follows:

"Last summer, as I was searching for flints, along the banks of the Musconeconck river, which runs along the foot of Schooley's mountain, a range stretching in a south-westerly direction through the state of New-Jersey, I was somewhat startled by the sudden of a little old woman, of a very appearance outre and singular appearance. She was crossing the stream on the back of a large turtle. Her height seemed about eighteen inches; her head was covered with a bubble of azure; her spectacles were of the purest chrystal water, which had assumed the consistency of glass; she wore a coat of mail made of the skin of a goldfish; her shield was formed from the shell of a pearl-muscle; her spear of a lobster's whisker; and her buskins were of sturgeon's nose, which being of incomparable elasticity, must have wonderfully assisted her in walking, when inclined to that wholesome and too much neglected exercise.

"The appearance of her face was not a little incongruous; and presented several interesting contradictions. Her hair was silvery white, apparently with age, while her face was that of a beautiful girl of sixteen, except that her eyes were of flint colour; her teeth of the finest red coral, and her lips of pale green. She guided the turtle across the wave with graceful negligence, the animal all the while singing melodiously in praise of fairy land. On reaching the bank, where I was standing in mute admiration, she dismounted from the turtle, who, making an ele VOL. II 2

gant bow, slid back into the water, and disappeared warbling the most delicious strains.

"As she approached me, for want of something else to say, I asked her, with all due deference, if she could direct me where I might find some good flints. 'Flints?' exclaimed she in a rage, 'I'll flint you with a vengeance!' and thereupon her eyes, which I then first discovered were real flints, struck out actual sparks of fire, exceedingly bright and luminous. 'Know, ignorant, presumptuous mortal,' continued the old lady—that my name is Agathe Pyromaque—the deuce it is, thought I, that is Latin for flints—and that I am the guardian of this haunted stream and yonder woody mountain, inhabited by millions of flinty-hearted damsels, who hate the very sight of man, and never forgive any rash mortal who violates their sacred recesses. Prepare then— but let me first ask are you married?' I told her I had a wife and nine small children. Then is there no hope for thee, thou egregious, uxorious monster. Prepare to suffer the penalty of thy rash intrusion, which is, to be petrified into a flint, and doomed to inhabit a tinder-box, for the space of one hundred and sixty millions of moons, having for thy companion a piece of steel, with which thou mayest amuse thyself by striking fire.'

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"So saying, she approached me, waving her spear; she touched my shoulder, and already I felt the approaches of this terrible transformation. My teeth began to knock against each other, and at every blow, sparks of fire came out of my mouth and nose,

as if they had been blast furnaces, while my nails gradually assumed the appearance and consistency of gun-flints. At this awful moment, I recollected that I had in my pocket a preparation for accomplishing an almost instantaneous analysis of flint, and immediately sprinkled some of it over this diabolical damsel, who, in less than two minutes, separated into her constituent parts, chalk and lime

stone.

"Immediately the whole space of ether was animated by millions of flints, meeting in the air with horrible snapping, as if a hundred thousand triggers had been drawn at one and the same instant, and nothing was to be seen but innumerable sparks of fire, flashing and hissing about in a most extraordinary style. This tremendous uproar was heightened by a general discharge of all the guns in the neighbourhood, furnished with flints from this mountain, which went off simultaneously of themselves, doing infinite damage, but killing no one, as no enchantment has power over the life of man.

"When this confused uproar ceased, the air became calm and still. Again I beheld the serene sky bending down to kiss the mountain top, on which the last rays of the setting sun were playfully sporting, and the pure stream silently creeping its way, like a serpent through the green grass, reflecting in its transparent bosom one of the loveliest scenes in nature."

There, Frank, I have taken the trouble of copying this curious letter, for the honour of the country, and