She rode as
gracefully as a Trooper. I wish with all my heart that I was as daring a
rider, or half so graceful.
* * * * *
"This morning walked down to the Pulpit Rock Hill, and climbed up into
the pulpit. It looks like a rough place to preach from, and does not
seem so much like a pulpit when one is in it, as when viewing it from
the road below. It is a wild place, and really a curiosity. I brought a
book and sat in the rocky recess, and read for nearly an hour. This is a
point on the road known to all teamsters. They have a string of names
for reference by which they tell each other where they met
fellow-teamsters and where their loads got stuck, and I have learned
them from those who stop for drinks at the store. One meets another near
our house, and says, 'Where did you meet Bill?' 'Just this side of
Small's Brook,' or 'At the top of Gray's Pinch,' 'At the Dry Mill-Pond,'
'Just the other side of Lemmy Jones's,' 'On the long causeway,' 'At
Jeems Gowen's,' 'Coming down the Pulpit Rock Hill,' 'Coming down Tarkill
Hill.' I have heard these answers till I have them by heart, without
having any idea where any of the places are, excepting the one I have
seen to-day. While on the bridge near the Pulpit, Mr. West, who lives
not far away, came along and asked where I had been. On my telling him,
he said that no money would hire him to go up to that pulpit; that the
Devil used to preach from it long and long ago; that on a time when
hundreds of them were listening to one of his sermons, a great chief
laughed in the Devil's face, upon which he stamped his foot, and the
ground to the southwest, where they were standing, sunk fifty feet, and
every Indian went down out of sight, leaving a swamp to this day.
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