Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/96

88 generation, and spread over many miles. Beyond the rather savage picturesqueness of the place, its secluded situation, and the chance that Indian rites may once have taken place there, I know of nothing to throw light on the matter.

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Crossing the river and going a very little downward, you would come to what was formerly the Mount Vernon estate. Professor Otis T. Mason, who formerly dwelt on a part of it, tells me that at the crossing of two roads there formerly stood an upright landmark, or what seemed to be one, which went by the above title. It was said that a man had murdered his wife there because of a quarrel about a pincushion; and that in (rather illogical) consequence she lay in wait at this point for benighted wayfarers, whom she delighted to stick full of pins. A sceptic finally took up the stone and built it into his barn by way of disproof; but unluckily the barn took fire and burned down, a series of misfortunes followed, and in the end the hold of the Pincushion Stone on popular credulity was stronger than ever.

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Cacapan creek is one of the minor affluents of the Potomac while that river passes through the Alleghany ridges; and one of the minor folds of those ridges parallel with the creek is known as Cacapan mountain. Walking over this beside a mountaineer some years ago, I heard from him a local legend which sounded to me like something fresh from the old world. I had asked him if there were any mines of valuable metals thereabout. After some information of a commonplace kind, he added that as to gold and silver there was plenty of them in the mountains as everybody knew; and the place had been found. A lot of foreign men, who acted very queerly, and kept to themselves, and who spoke a language which nobody about them could understand, had settled along that mountain, and dug into it, and found gold there. They worked at night mostly; and at last left suddenly, and covered the hole with a stone, and put a spell on it. For a long time nobody could find the spot; but a man out hunting