INTRODUCTION
THE first three numbers in this collection are tales of the White Hills
in New Hampshire. The passages from Sketches from Memory show
that Hawthorne had visited the mountains in one of his occasional
rambles from home, but there are no entries in his Note Books which
give accounts of such a visit. There is, however, among these notes the
following interesting paragraph, written in 1840 and clearly
foreshadowing The Great Stone Face:
\'The semblance of a human face to be formed on the side of a
mountain, or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturae [freak of
nature]. The face is an object of curiosity for years or centuries, and by
and by a boy is born whose features gradually assume the aspect of that
portrait. At some critical juncture the resemblance is found to be perfect.
A prophecy may be connected.\'
It is not impossible that this conceit occurred to Hawthorne before he
had himself seen the Old Man of the Mountain, or the Profile, in the
Franconia Notch which is generally associated in the minds of readers
with The Great Stone Face.
In The Ambitious Guest he has made use of the incident still told to
travellers through the Notch, of the destruction of the Willey family in
August, 1826. The house occupied by the family was on the slope of a
mountain, and after a long drought there was a terrible tempest which
not only raised the river to a great height but loosened the surface of the
mountain so that a great landslide took place. The house was in the track
of the slide, and the family rushed out of doors. Had they remained
within they would have been safe, for a ledge above the house parted the
avalanche so that it was diverted into two paths and swept past the house
on either side. Mr. and Mrs. Willey, their five children, and two hired
men were crushed under the weight of earth, rocks, and trees.