r little
boy sat at the door of their cottage, talking about the Great Stone
Face. They had but to lift their eyes, and there it was plainly to be
seen, though miles away, with the sunshine brightening all its
features.

And what was the Great Stone Face?

Embosomed amongst a family of lofty mountains, there was a valley so
spacious that It contained many thousand inhabitants. Some of these
good people dwelt in log-huts, with the black forest all around them,
on the steep and difficult hillsides. Others had their homes in
comfortable farmhouses, and cultivated the rich soil on the gentle
slopes or level surfaces of the valley. Others, again, were
congregated into populous villages, where some wild, highland rivulet,
tumbling down from its birthplace in the upper mountain region, had
been caught and tamed by human cunning, and compelled to turn the
machinery of cotton-factories. The inhabitants of this valley, in
short, were numerous, and of many modes of life. But all of them,
grown people and children, had a kind of familiarity with the Great
Stone Face, although some possessed the gift of distinguishing this
grand natural phenomenon more perfectly than many of their neighbours.
The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of Nature in her mood of
majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain
by some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a
position as, when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble
the features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous
giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice.
There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height;
the nose, with its long bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they
could have spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one
end of the valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator
approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and
could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in
chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the
wondrous features would again be seen; and the farther he withdrew
from them, the more like a human face, with all its original divinity
intact did they appear; until, as it grew dim in the distance, with
the clouds and glorified vapour of the mountains clustering about it,
the Great Stone Face seemed positively to be alive.

It was a happy lot for children to grow up to manhood or wom