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New Hope; Or, the Rescue. a Tale of the Great Kanawha
New Hope Or the Rescue a Tale of the Great Kanawha Author:John Lewis General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1855 Original Publisher: Bunce Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select fr... more »om more than a million books for free. Excerpt: IE HOPE. CHAPTER I. On a fine day in October, 1798, a young gentleman and lady were standing near that remarkable canal worn down by the action of the swiftly-rushing water of the falls of the Great Kanawha. The weather had been dry; the river was low, and much of the rock-covered bottom, which is usually under water, was now exposed, and afforded a pleasant and interesting promenade. They had been examining those singularly smooth, regular cavities in the rock which are called pot-holes. In some of these were fishes, which the receding waters had left imprisoned. In all of them was the instrument of their formation -- a stone, which, whirled around by the current in some indentation of the rock, had, by its attrition, worn a deep hole, and had itself become a smooth and polished pebble. While they were gazing on the clear, deep blue water, which, with arrowy swiftness, was darting through the chasm on the edge of which they stood, the sharp report of a rifle quite near made Matilda Ballenger start. They looked up, and her brother, William Henry Ballenger, saw the smoke of the gun. curling above the high and craggy clifl" that overhangs the narrow valley at the falls, and wafted away in fantastic wreath by the gentle wind. The body of some animal, which, for a moment, seemed suspended in the air, tumbled down the side of the mountain, and, after a spasmodic struggle of momentary duration, lay motionless on the ground. As the smoke passed off, there appeared on the hrow of the beetling cliff the form of a man with a rifle in his hand, which he was already reloading; and as...« less