Upon the wild spot where he fell his children afterward erected a beautiful monument of Nova Scotia freestone, carved with exquisite taste, in the highest style of art. It was brought in pieces to the spot by the hands of the sorrowing workmen of the forge. Upon it is this touching inscription: ERECTED BY FILIAL AFFECTION TO THE MEMORY OF OUR DEAR FATHER, WHO ACCIDENTALLY LOST HIS LIFE ON THIS SPOT 3D SEPTEMBER, 1845."

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How often," says Street, "has the wild wolf made his lair beside it; how often the savage panther glared at its beautiful proportions, and wondered what object met his blazing eye-balls."

After the death of Mr. Henderson, the industries of the little village flagged. Its distance from market over almost impassable roads proved to be an insuperable hindrance to its further progress. In a few years the Adirondack village, as a business enterprise, was entirely abandoned. For nearly a quarter of a century it has been left to decay, and has been the abode of solitary fishermen and hunters. Nature, always aggressive, is fast re-asserting her stern dominion over the once busy scene-once busy, but now desolate and forsaken

"Where the owl still hooting sits,

Where the bat incessant flits."

CHAPTER XVII.

VISCOUNT DE CHATEAUBRIAND.

"I planted in my heart one seed of love
Watered with tears and watched with tenderest care,
It grew, but when I look'd that it might prove
A glorious tree, and precious fruit might bear,
Blossoms nor fruit were there to crown my pain,
Tears, care, and labor had been all in vain,"
Yet now I dare not pluck it from my heart,
Lest with the deep-struck root, my life depart."
-Quoted from memory.

Among the many distinguished European travelers who, like Peter Kalm, Tom. Moore, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, and the Prince de Talleyrand, visited Northern New York while it was still nearly all clothed in the wild splendor of its primeval forests, was Châteaubriand, the eminent author and statesman of France. Seventy years ago his works were read and admired by every one. They were dramatized and acted upon the stage, and translated into other tongues. They were then the best interpreters of the spirit of the age-the spirit of reviving Christianity. Today he is almost forgotten.

François Auguste, Viscount de Châteaubriand, was born of a noble family on the 14th of September, 1768, at St. Malo, the birthplace of the old mariner Jacques Cartier, the discoverer of the river St. Lawrence. St. Malo, as before stated in these pages, is a quaint old seaport town of Brittany, built in medieval times upon a rock then forming a part of the mainland. In 1709 an earthquake turned it into an island, and it is now a huge rock standing in the

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middle of a salt marsh, which is covered by the sea at high tide.

Many a strange old superstition still flourishes among its simple people. Its quaint medieval customs were carried to the New World by its old mariners, and the songs heard in its streets found a wild echo among the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence and along the mountain shores of Lake Champlain. Thus, too, in the wilds of the New World were introduced by these mariners the stories of the dwarfs and giants of the fairy mythology which the Northmen of the tenth century brought from their ancient home when they invaded Brittany.

The family of Châteaubriand, like many of the old noblesse, had, in his youth, fallen into decay. His early days were passed in squalid poverty, his father saving all his income to buy back the family possessions. With shirt in rags, his stockings full of holes, and his slippers down at the heel, the proud, sensitive, romantic boy would shrink from his better dressed companions, and wander for days on the shore of some lonely bay among the rocks, watching the waves of the storm-beaten Atlantic, as they came in, freighted with wild tales of the wonderful land beyond it in the New World. It was here in his moody, brooding boyhood, while studying Rousseau, that he conceived the idea of a romance founded upon savage life, and pictured to his imagination a beautiful creature, clothed with every virtue and girlish charm, whom he called his Sylphide. This fairy creature of his boyish fancy, this "vision beautiful," haunted his dreams until after he had become familiar with the dusky maidens of the American forests, it grew at length into his "Atala," the heroine of his most famous story.

Finally he was sent to school, and growing up to manhood, wandered to Paris just as the delirium of the French Revolution was at its height. In Paris he found every one living in the wildest excitement at balls, theatres, clubs, political meetings, gaming houses, and the old order of things in state, in religious and in social life, completely reversed.

II.

HIS JOURNEYINGS.

We now come to the second phase of his life. Out of the turmoil of the Revolution, Châteaubriand, in the year 1791, sailed for America. After visiting Philadelphia, and being presented to Gen. Washington, to whom he had letters of introduction, he went to New York, and then to Albany. Westward of Albany even, in those days, the whole country lay spreading out in its aboriginal wildness, save a few feeble settlements up the Hudson and along the valley of the Mohawk. Châteaubriand now dressed himself in the garb of an Indian hunter, and plunged at once into the wilderness. Sometimes alone, sometimes in company with an Indian band of hunters, he wandered through the sublime scenes of primeval nature that he afterward painted so glowingly in his romances. Sometimes he would spend weeks together at an Indian village, studying the strange characters around him, and witnessing the wild gambols of the Indian children, saw in the perfect forms of the dusky forest maidens the physical ideal of his beauteous Sylphide. Sometimes in his travels he found the friendly shelter of a hut and a bed of bear skins. Oftener his bed was made "upon the dead leaves of a thousand years," under the

shelter of some mighty tree, beside a lonely camp-fire, "locked in the arms of a limitless moon-lit silence, broken only by the cries of wild animals, or the stir of the windswept leaves, or the distant roar of eternal Niagara."

After he had thus wandered for more than a year in these northern wilds, he found in a Canadian cabin an English newspaper, in which was an account of the arrest of Louis XVI. He hastened back to France to find his family in dungeons and his estates confiscated. The next eight years he spent in poverty and exile, composing in the meantime his immortal romances, that upon his return to France under the Consulate and the first Empire, were destined to create so deep and wide spread a sensation.

During the French Revolution the Voltaire school of thought accomplished its mission and reduced all its wild theories to practice. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Atheism were established, and failed to satisfy the wants of the people. Upon the establishment of the Consulate and the first Empire, when society began to move in its old channels, the people began to tire of the hopeless world of scepticism, and to long for the old belief. The sons of the absurd and nox

ment.

men who had considered Christianity an ious thing, were now longing ardently for its re-establishChâteaubriand was the first one to put these longings after the old belief into language, and his christian romances struck the popular heart of France with wonderful power, and made it thrill with joy.