y distinguished. We
soon entered the bay of Newhaven, and the town itself began to appear,
embosomed very snugly between the two mountains, and deriving no little
beauty from their prominent share in its surrounding scenery. I judged
them not more than four or five hundred feet high, but they are marked
with elegant peaks, and present a bold perpendicular front of trap-rock,
which, with the bay and harbour in the foreground, and a fine outline of
hills sloping away towards the horizon, conveys a most agreeable
impression to the approaching stranger of the region he is about to
visit. A person who stood looking out very near me, gave me the
information that the twin mountains were called, from their geographical
relations to the meridian of Newhaven, East and West Rocks, and added
the remark, for which I was hardly prepared, that West Rock was
celebrated as having afforded a refuge to the regicides Goffe and
Whalley.

My fellow-passenger, observing my interest in this statement, went on to
tell me, in substance, as follows. A cleft in its rugged rocks was once
actually inhabited by those scape-goats, and still goes by the name of
"The Regicides' Cave." Newhaven, moreover, contains the graves of these
men, and regards them with such remarkable veneration, that even the
railroad speed of progress and improvement has been checked to keep them
inviolate;--a tribute which, in America, must be regarded as very
marked, since no ordinary obstacle ever is allowed to interfere with
their perpetual "go-ahead." It seems the ancient grave-yard, where the
regicides repose, was found very desirable for a public square; and as a
mimic Pere-la-Chaise had just been created in the outskirts of the town,
away went coffins and bones, grave-stones and sepulchral effigies, and
monumental urns, to plant the new city of the dead, and make way for
living dogs, as better than defunct lions. Such a resurrection the
towns-folk gave to their respectable grandfathers and grandmothers; but
not to the relics of the regicides. At these shrines of murder and
rebellion, the spade and the mattock stood still; and their once
restless tenants, after shifting between so many disturbances while
living, were suffered to sleep on, in a kind of sepulchral limbo,
between the marble in Westminster Abbey, to which they once aspired, and
the ditch at Tyburn, which they so narrowly escaped.

I was cautioned by my communicative friend not to speak too freely of
'the R