Mercy Philbrick's Choice
Helen Hunt Jackson
| Finally, not content with these ordinary and established channels for preaching the gospel, he sought out for himself a new one. About eight miles from the village there was a negro settlement known as The cedars. It was a wild place. Great outcropping ledges of granite, with big boulders toppling over and piled upon each other, and all knotted together by the gnarled roots of ancient cedar trees, made the place seem like the ruins of old fortresses. There were caves of great depth, some of them with two entrances, in which, in the time of the fugitive slave law, many a poor hunted creature had had safe refuge. Besides the cedar trees, were sugar maples and white birches; and the beautiful rock ferns grew all over the ledges in high waving tufts, almost as luxuriantly as if they were in the tropics; so that the spot, wild and fierce as it was, had great beauty. Many of the fugitive slaves had built themselves huts here: some lived in the caves. A few poor and vicious whites had joined them, intermarried with them, and from these had gradually grown up a band of as mongrel, miserable vagabonds as is often seen. They were the terror of the neighborhood. Except for their supreme laziness, they would have been as dangerous as brigands; for they were utter outlaws. No man cared for them; and they cared for no man. |