The Hollow of the Three Hills
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Published: 1837
Categorie(s): Fiction, Short Stories
Source: http://gutenberg.org
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About Hawthorne:
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem,
Massachusetts, where his birthplace is now a museum. William
Hathorne, who emigrated from England in 1630, was the first
of Hawthorne's ancestors to arrive in the colonies. After arriv-
ing, William persecuted Quakers. William's son John Hathorne
was one of the judges who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials.
(One theory is that having learned about this, the author added
the "w" to his surname in his early twenties, shortly after
graduating from college.) Hawthorne's father, Nathaniel
Hathorne, Sr., was a sea captain who died in 1808 of yellow
fever, when Hawthorne was only four years old, in Raymond,
Maine. Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College at the expense of
an uncle from 1821 to 1824, befriending classmates Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce.
While there he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Until
the publication of his Twice-Told Tales in 1837, Hawthorne
wrote in the comparative obscurity of what he called his "owl's
nest" in the family home. As he looked back on this period of
his life, he wrote: "I have not lived, but only dreamed about liv-
ing." And yet it was this period of brooding and writing that
had formed, as Malcolm Cowley was to describe it, "the central
fact in Hawthorne's career," his "term of apprenticeship" that
would eventually result in the "richly meditated fiction."
Hawthorne was hired in 1839 as a weigher and gauger at the
Boston Custom House. He had become engaged in the previous
year to the illustrator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody.
Seeking a possible home for himself and Sophia, he joined the
transcendentalist utopian community at Brook Farm in 1841;
later that year, however, he left when he became dissatisfied
with farming and the experiment. (His Brook Farm adventure
would prove an inspiration for his novel The Blithedale Ro-
mance.) He married Sophia in 1842; they moved to The Old
Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where they lived for three
years. There he wrote most of the tales collected in Mosses
from an Old Manse. Hawthorne and his wife then moved to
Salem and later to the Berkshires, returning in 1852 to Con-
cord and a new home The Wayside, previously owned by the
Alcotts. Their neighbors in Concord included Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Like Hawthorne, Sophia
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was a reclusive person. She was bedridden with headaches un-
til her sister introduced her to Hawthorne, after which her
headaches seem to have abated. The Hawthornes enjoyed a
long marriage, often taking walks in the park. Sophia greatly
admired her husband's work. In one of her journals, she writes:
"I am always so dazzled and bewildered with the richness, the
depth, the… jewels of beauty in his productions that I am al-
ways looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder
and muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts."
In 1846, Hawthorne was appointed surveyor (determining the
quantity and value of imported goods) at the Salem Custom
House. Like his earlier appointment to the custom house in Bo-
ston, this employment was vulnerable to the politics of the
spoils system. A Democrat, Hawthorne lost this job due to the
change of administration in Washington after the presidential
election of 1848. Hawthorne's career as a novelist was boosted
by The Scarlet Letter in 1850, in which the preface refers to
his three-year tenure in the Custom House at Salem. The
House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance
(1852) followed in quick succession. In 1852, he wrote the
campaign biography of his old friend Franklin Pierce. With
Pierce's election as president, Hawthorne was rewarded in
1853 with the position of United States consul in Liverpool. In
1857, his appointment ended and the Hawthorne family toured
France and Italy. They returned to The Wayside in 1860, and
that year saw the publication of The Marble Faun. Failing
health (which biographer Edward Miller speculates was stom-
ach cancer) prevented him from completing several more ro-
mances. Hawthorne died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in Ply-
mouth, New Hampshire while on a tour of the White Mountains
with Pierce. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Con-
cord, Massachusetts. Wife Sophia and daughter Una were ori-
ginally buried in England. However, in June 2006, they were
re-interred in plots adjacent to Nathaniel. Nathaniel and
Sophia Hawthorne had three children: Una, Julian, and Rose.
Una was a victim of mental illness and died young. Julian
moved out west, served a jail term for embezzlement and wrote
a book about his father. Rose married George Parsons Lathrop
and they became Roman Catholics. After George's death, Rose
became a Dominican nun. She founded the Dominican Sisters
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of Hawthorne to care for victims of incurable cancer. Source:
Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Hawthorne:
• The Scarlet Letter (1850)
• The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
• The Minister's Black Veil (1837)
• Rappaccini's Daughter (1844)
• The Birth-Mark (1843)
• Biographical Stories (1842)
• Young Goodman Brown (1835)
• The Blithedale Romance (1852)
• Fire Worship (1843)
• The Marble Faun (1860)
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In those strange old times, when fantastic dreams and
madmen's reveries were realized among the actual circum-
stances of life, two persons met together at an appointed hour
and place. One was a lady, graceful in form and fair of feature,
though pale and troubled, and smitten with an untimely blight
in what should have been the fullest bloom of her years; the
other was an ancient and meanly-dressed woman, of ill-favored
aspect, and so withered, shrunken, and decrepit, that even the
space since she began to decay must have exceeded the ordin-
ary term of human existence. In the spot where they en-
countered, no mortal could observe them. Three little hills
stood near each other, and down in the midst of them sunk a
hollow basin, almost mathematically circular, two or three hun-
dred feet in breadth, and of such depth that a stately cedar
might but just be visible above the sides. Dwarf pines were nu-
merous upon the hills, and partly fringed the outer verge of the
intermediate hollow, within which there was nothing but the
brown grass of October, and here and there a tree trunk that
had fallen long ago, and lay mouldering with no green success-
sor from its roots. One of these masses of decaying wood,
formerly a majestic oak, rested close beside a pool of green
and sluggish water at the bottom of the basin. Such scenes as
this (so gray tradition tells) were once the resort of the Power
of Evil and his plighted subjects; and here, at midnight or on
the dim verge of evening, they were said to stand round the
mantling pool, disturbing its putrid waters in the performance
of an impious baptismal rite. The chill beauty of an autumnal
sunset was now gilding the three hill-tops, whence a paler tint
stole down their sides into the hollow.
"Here is our pleasant meeting come to pass," said the aged
crone, "according as thou hast desired. Say quickly what thou
wouldst have of me, for there is but a short hour that we may
tarry here."
As the old withered woman spoke, a smile glimmered on her
countenance, like lamplight on the wall of a sepulchre. The
lady trembled, and cast her eyes upward to the verge of the
basin, as if meditating to return with her purpose unaccom-
plished. But it was not so ordained.
"I am a stranger in this land, as you know," said she at
length. "Whence I come it matters not; but I have left those
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behind me with whom my fate was intimately bound, and from
whom I am cut off forever. There is a weight in my bosom that
I cannot away with, and I have come hither to inquire of their
welfare."
"And who is there by this green pool that can bring thee
news from the ends of the earth?" cried the old woman, peer-
ing into the lady's face. "Not from my lips mayst thou hear
these tidings; yet, be thou bold, and the daylight shall not pass
away from yonder hill-top before thy wish be granted."
"I will do your bidding though I die," replied the lady
desperately.
The old woman seated herself on the trunk of the fallen tree,
threw aside the hood that shrouded her gray locks, and
beckoned her companion to draw near.
"Kneel down," she said, "and lay your forehead on my knees."
She hesitated a moment, but the anxiety that had long been
kindling burned fiercely up within her. As she knelt down, the
border of her garment was dipped into the pool; she laid her
forehead on the old woman's knees, and the latter drew a cloak
about the lady's face, so that she was in darkness. Then she
heard the muttered words of prayer, in the midst of which she
started, and would have arisen.
"Let me flee,—let me flee and hide myself, that they may not
look upon me!" she cried. But, with returning recollection, she
hushed herself, and was still as death.
For it seemed as if other voices—familiar in infancy, and un-
forgotten through many wanderings, and in all the vicissitudes
of her heart and fortune—were mingling with the accents of
the prayer. At first the words were faint and indistinct, not
rendered so by distance, but rather resembling the dim pages
of a book which we strive to read by an imperfect and gradu-
ally brightening light. In such a manner, as the prayer pro-
ceeded, did those voices strengthen upon the ear; till at length
the petition ended, and the conversation of an aged man, and
of a woman broken and decayed like himself, became distinctly
audible to the lady as she knelt. But those strangers appeared
not to stand in the hollow depth between the three hills. Their
voices were encompassed and reechoed by the walls of a cham-
ber, the windows of which were rattling in the breeze; the reg-
ular vibration of a clock, the crackling of a fire, and the tinkling
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of the embers as they fell among the ashes, rendered the scene
almost as vivid as if painted to the eye. By a melancholy hearth
sat these two old people, the man calmly despondent, the wo-
man querulous and tearful, and their words were all of sorrow.
They spoke of a daughter, a wanderer they knew not where,
bearing dishonor along with her, and leaving shame and afflic-
tion to bring their gray heads to the grave. They alluded also to
other and more recent woe, but in the midst of their talk their
voices seemed to melt into the sound of the wind sweeping
mournfully among the autumn leaves; and when the lady lifted
her eyes, there was she kneeling in the hollow between three
hills.
"A weary and lonesome time yonder old couple have of it,"
remarked the old woman, smiling in the lady's face.
"And did you also hear them?" exclaimed she, a sense of in-
tolerable humiliation triumphing over her agony and fear.
"Yea; and we have yet more to hear," replied the old woman.
"Wherefore, cover thy face quickly."
Again the withered hag poured forth the monotonous words
of a prayer that was not meant to be acceptable in heaven; and
soon, in the pauses of her breath, strange murmurings began
to thicken, gradually increasing so as to drown and overpower
the charm by which they grew. Shrieks pierced through the ob-
scurity of sound, and were succeeded by the singing of sweet
female voices, which, in their turn, gave way to a wild roar of
laughter, broken suddenly by groanings and sobs, forming alto-
gether a ghastly confusion of terror and mourning and mirth.
Chains were rattling, fierce and stern voices uttered threats,
and the scourge resounded at their command. All these noises
deepened and became substantial to the listener's ear, till she
could distinguish every soft and dreamy accent of the love
songs that died causelessly into funeral hymns. She shuddered
at the unprovoked wrath which blazed up like the spontaneous
kindling of flames and she grew faint at the fearful merriment
raging miserably around her. In the midst of this wild scene,
where unbound passions jostled each other in a drunken ca-
reer, there was one solemn voice of a man, and a manly and
melodious voice it might once have been. He went to and fro
continually, and his feet sounded upon the floor. In each mem-
ber of that frenzied company, whose own burning thoughts had
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become their exclusive world, he sought an auditor for the
story of his individual wrong, and interpreted their laughter
and tears as his reward of scorn or pity. He spoke of woman's
perfidy, of a wife who had broken her holiest vows, of a home
and heart made desolate. Even as he went on, the shout, the
laugh, the shriek the sob, rose up in unison, till they changed
into the hollow, fitful, and uneven sound of the wind, as it
fought among the pine-trees on those three lonely hills. The
lady looked up, and there was the withered woman smiling in
her face.
"Couldst thou have thought there were such merry times in a
madhouse?" inquired the latter.
"True, true," said the lady to herself; "there is mirth within
its walls, but misery, misery without."
"Wouldst thou hear more?" demanded the old woman.
"There is one other voice I would fain listen to again," replied
the lady, faintly.
"Then, lay down thy head speedily upon my knees, that thou
mayst get thee hence before the hour be past."
The golden skirts of day were yet lingering upon the hills,
but deep shades obscured the hollow and the pool, as if sombre
night were rising thence to overspread the world. Again that
evil woman began to weave her spell. Long did it proceed un-
answered, till the knolling of a bell stole in among the intervals
of her words, like a clang that had travelled far over valley and
rising ground, and was just ready to die in the air. The lady
shook upon her companion's knees as she heard that boding
sound. Stronger it grew and sadder, and deepened into the
tone of a death bell, knolling dolefully from some ivy-mantled
tower, and bearing tidings of mortality and woe to the cottage,
to the hall, and to the solitary wayfarer that all might weep for
the doom appointed in turn to them. Then came a measured
tread, passing slowly, slowly on, as of mourners with a coffin,
their garments trailing on the ground, so that the ear could
measure the length of their melancholy array. Before them
went the priest, reading the burial service, while the leaves of
his book were rustling in the breeze. And though no voice but
his was heard to speak aloud, still there were revilings and
anathemas, whispered but distinct, from women and from men,
breathed against the daughter who had wrung the aged hearts
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of her parents,—the wife who had betrayed the trusting fond-
ness of her husband,—the mother who had sinned against nat-
ural affection, and left her child to die. The sweeping sound of
the funeral train faded away like a thin vapor, and the wind,
that just before had seemed to shake the coffin pall, moaned
sadly round the verge of the Hollow between three Hills. But
when the old woman stirred the kneeling lady, she lifted not
her head.
"Here has been a sweet hour's sport!" said the withered
crone, chuckling to herself.
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