ality on the
Susquehanna River near Havre de Grace. In that day the tradition was
repeated by a few of the oldest inhabitants who dwelt in the region.
I dare say it has now entirely run out of all remembrance amongst
their descendants, and that I am, perhaps, the only individual in the
State who has preserved any traces of the facts to which I allude.

There was, until not long ago, a notable cavern at the foot of a
rocky cliff about a mile below the town of Port Deposit. It was of
small compass, yet sufficiently spacious to furnish some rude shelter
against the weather to one who might seek refuge within its solitary
chamber. It opened upon the river just where a small brook comes
brattling down the bank, along the base of a hill of some magnitude
that yet retains the stately name of Mount Ararat. The visitor of
this cavern might approach it by a boat from the river, or by a
rugged path along the margin of the brook and across the ledges of
the rock. This rough shelter went by the name of Talbot's Cave down
to a very recent period, and would still go by that name, if it were
yet in existence. But it happened, not many years since, that Port
Deposit was awakened to a sudden notion of the value of the granite
of the cliff, and, as commerce is a most ruthless contemner of all
romance, and never hesitates between a speculation of profit and a
speculation of history, Talbot's Cave soon began to figure
conspicuously in the Price Current, and in a very little while
disappeared, like a witch from the stage, in blasts of sulphur fire
and rumbling thunder, under the management of those effective
scene-shifters, the quarrymen. A government contract, more potent than
the necromancy of the famed wizard Michael Scott, lifted this massive
rock from its base, and, flying with it full two hundred miles,
buried it fathoms below the surface of the Atlantic, at the Rip Raps,
near Hampton Roads; and thus it happens that I cannot vouch the
ocular proof of the Cave to certify the legend I am about to relate.

The tradition attached to this spot had nothing but a misty and
spectral outline. It was indefinite in the date, uncertain as to
persons, mysterious as to the event,--just such a tradition as to
whet the edge of one's curiosity and to leave it hopeless of
gratification. I may relate it in a few words.

Once upon a time, somewhere between one and two hundred years ago,
there was a man by the name of Talbot, a kinsman of Lord Baltimore