Israel Potter | Page 2

appears upon the scene
XI. Paul Jones in a reverie
XII. Recrossing the Channel, Israel returns to the Squire's abode--His adventures there
XIII. His escape from the house, with various adventures following
XIV. In which Israel is sailor under two flags, and in three ships, and all in one night
XV. They sail as far as the Crag of Ailsa
XVI. They look in at Carrickfergus, and descend on Whitehaven
XVII. They call at the Earl of Selkirk's, and afterwards fight the ship-of-war Drake
XVIII. The Expedition that sailed from Groix
XIX. They fight the Serapis.
XX. The Shuttle
XXI. Samson among the Philistines
XXII. Something further of Ethan Allen; with Israel's flight towards the wilderness
XXIII. Israel in Egypt
XXIV. Continued
XXV. In the City of Dis
XXVI Forty-five years
XXVII. Requiescat in pace

ISRAEL POTTER
Fifty Years of Exile

CHAPTER I
.
THE BIRTHPLACE OF ISRAEL.
The traveller who at the present day is content to travel in the good old Asiatic style,
neither rushed along by a locomotive, nor dragged by a stage-coach; who is willing to
enjoy hospitalities at far-scattered farmhouses, instead of paying his bill at an inn; who is
not to be frightened by any amount of loneliness, or to be deterred by the roughest roads
or the highest hills; such a traveller in the eastern part of Berkshire, Massachusetts, will
find ample food for poetic reflection in the singular scenery of a country, which, owing to
the ruggedness of the soil and its lying out of the track of all public conveyances, remains
almost as unknown to the general tourist as the interior of Bohemia.
Travelling northward from the township of Otis, the road leads for twenty or thirty miles
towards Windsor, lengthwise upon that long broken spur of heights which the Green
Mountains of Vermont send into Massachusetts. For nearly the whole of the distance, you
have the continual sensation of being upon some terrace in the moon. The feeling of the
plain or the valley is never yours; scarcely the feeling of the earth. Unless by a sudden
precipitation of the road you find yourself plunging into some gorge, you pass on, and on,
and on, upon the crests or slopes of pastoral mountains, while far below, mapped out in
its beauty, the valley of the Housatonie lies endlessly along at your feet. Often, as your
horse gaining some lofty level tract, flat as a table, trots gayly over the almost deserted
and sodded road, and your admiring eye sweeps the broad landscape beneath, you seem
to be Bootes driving in heaven. Save a potato field here and there, at long intervals, the
whole country is either in wood or pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep are the principal
inhabitants of these mountains. But all through the year lazy columns of smoke, rising
from the depths of the forest, proclaim the presence of that half-outlaw, the
charcoal-burner; while in early spring added curls of vapor show that the maple
sugar-boiler is also at work. But as for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of
it here. At any rate, no man by that means accumulates a fortune from this thin and rocky
soil, all whose arable parts have long since been nearly exhausted.
Yet during the first settlement of the country, the region was not unproductive. Here it
was that the original settlers came, acting upon the principle well known to have
regulated their choice of site, namely, the high land in preference to the low, as less
subject to the unwholesome miasmas generated by breaking into the rich valleys and
alluvial bottoms of primeval regions. By degrees, however, they quitted the safety of this
sterile elevation, to brave the dangers of richer though lower fields. So that, at the present
day, some of those mountain townships present an aspect of singular abandonment.
Though they have never known aught but peace and health, they, in one lesser aspect at
least, look like countries depopulated by plague and war. Every mile or two a house is
passed untenanted. The strength of the frame-work of these ancient buildings enables
them long to resist the encroachments of decay. Spotted gray and green with the
weather-stain, their timbers seem to have lapsed back into their woodland original,
forming part now of the general picturesqueness of the natural scene. They are of
extraordinary size, compared with modern farmhouses. One peculiar feature is the
immense chimney, of light gray stone, perforating the middle of the roof like a tower.
On all sides are seen the tokens of ancient industry. As stone abounds throughout these

mountains, that material was, for fences, as ready to the hand as wood, besides being
much more durable. Consequently the landscape is intersected in all directions with walls
of uncommon neatness and