OSSIPEE FALLS.

I begin shrewdly to suspect the young man of a terrible taint-Poetry; with which idle disease, if he be infected, there's no hope of him in a state course.BEN JOHNSON.

No one who has ever lived or travelled at the north, can forget a New England village. In many respects it is unlike every other place where human beings congregate. Its broad streets; its gravelled side-walks ; its neat white houses, with their green venetians and pretty porticos; its fine old elms at the corners, and shrubbery in the court-yards, and rich meadows all about it; make it worthy of the fame it has acquired, the world over. Take the pleasantest country town elsewhere, and it lacks something of coming up to the standard of a New England village. There may be more elegance and more wealth in many a hamlet at the South, and the Middle States boast numbers of towns of great taste and beauty; yet there is wanting that air of neatness, and that true independence of manhood, which the mountain breezes give to the population of her valleys, which associates with a New Engand village all that we love in nature, with all that we admire in humanity.

But of all other villages in New England, those which lie on the shores of Winnepiseoga Lake, are to me by far the most beautiful. Massachusetts boasts of her Northampton, her Worcester, and her Stockbridge -the last deriving not a little of its celebrity from being the residence of one of the cleverest women in the states-and they are all very lovely; yet they lack that wonderful adornment which nature has bestowed, that rare union of the extremes of grandeur and beauty, which makes up the enchantment of the villages on the lake. What, for example, can be prettier than the views of Centre-Harbor, from the west or north? As the traveller comes over the hills, and the broad valley lies spread out before him, with the village sleeping quietly in its bosom, he will involuntarily rein in his horse, that he may the longer gaze on what is so very, very lovely! Far away to the east, the long range of the Ossipee mountains confines his vision to a prospect as fair as that which the Jewish ruler saw of old from Mount Nebo. The whole valley of the Winnepiseoga, with its rich farms, and broad lake, and gay diversity of hill and dale, swells and ripens to his view, and the green copses here and there dotting the whole surface, add a charm to the picture, of which no gazer ever yet tired. The river winds its course along to the lake, now expanding itself into a broad sheet, to supply the ever-busy wheel of the manufactory, and then narrowing to its own modest size, and flashing back the glad sunshine from its ripples, as it glides softly through

meadows and hazle-wood. The hard beaten road runs like a white line over the landscape, at times winding past neat farm-houses and spacious barns, and at others lost for a space in the dark woods of beech and maple, which cast their unchanging shadows over the way.

And then the Lake-house, standing at the head of the beautiful bay, whose ripples almost lave its foundations; dear to me from the associations of white arms and jet-black eyes, flashing through their long dark fringes, which my college days have clustered about them; the long wharf and its mimic ships; the light sail-boat bending gracefully to the wind; the old trees on the shore, and the foot-paths winding among the close, thick under-brush of the forest-all together make up to my eye the most beautiful panorama I have ever beheld.

I well remember that one pleasant October morning, sundry of us, who were making a temporary residence at Centre Harbor, set out to visit the Falls on the Ossipee mountain. After driving some eight or ten miles to the foot of the mountain, we left our horses and vehicles, and made the ascent on foot. The path led along the top of high banks, and precipices edging a ravine, through which a stream, by a gradually descending and winding course, tumbled and foamed over its rocky bed toward the valley below. I never remember to have more enjoyed the freshness of the air, the beauty of the grass and flowers, the twittering of the birds, the whirring, ever and anon, of some pheasant

scared from its haunt, and the various other sources of delight, both to the ear and the eye.

Before reaching the Falls, we diverged from the stream, with the intention of taking a shorter route over the mountain to the fountain head, which we were told was well worth seeing, and then following its course downward. After half an hour's walk over every variety of surface, rock, morass, and jungle, we reached the spot, and found ourselves well compensated for our labor. It is a large, circular spring, ten or twelve yards across, from the clear sanded bottom of which the water was gushing out in a thousand places. Just beyond the outlet, the stream was playing in every variety of motion; now almost placid, running off into meandering rivulets, then shooting with rapidity over large smooth masses, bearing on its rich, transparent bosom, white bubbles, like fairy barks in a race. this was seen under the green light of overhanging foliage, waving only to give entrance to the partial sunbeams, that passed and repassed, like unembodied spirits of light, in their pastime and gladness. It was so gentle and peaceful, that the very birds seemed to bid you doff ambition, and enter the haunts of innocence and tranquil wisdom!

All

Crossing bridges formed of decayed logs, the path winds downward by the bank, close to the water, until a precipitous rock denies further progress over the ledges of which the stream descends. It is then shut in during its whole course onward to the cascade, by

high banks, forty, sixty, and even an hundred feet high, and generally perpendicular. It is here, where the distance between the banks is fifteen or eighteen feet, that Chamberlain made his famous leap, when pursued by the Indians; Chamberlain, so well known for his fearless exploits during Lovell's war. Tradition adds, that one Indian, in attempting to follow, failed to reach the opposite bank, and was dashed to pieces on the rocks below.

The scenery at the Falls is strikingly beautiful and unique. The hills all around rough and rocky, with their recesses slightly wooded, rise bright into the blue sky, and are admirably set off by the foliage of the trees that start out from the declivities of the ravine. The stream glides smoothly over its bed, here and there edging the fragments of stone, that impede its motion, to the very brink of the chasm, when it projects itself in one unbroken leap of ninety feet into the basin below! The basin is a perfect circle, of twenty yards in diameter, completely walled in, save at a single outlet, by precipices of moss-covered rocks, nearly a hundred and fifty feet high. As you stand on its border with the dark and damp rocks rising perpendicularly above you, watching the silvery mass pouring itself, as it were, from the blue bosom of the sky into the depths below, the scene is irresistibly charming. It gave to me an unmingled pleasure, which I have never since received from any of nature's works, and which I can never cease to remember.