Myths and Legends
face. A few evenings later she was seen standing on Sunrise Rock, with her look bent on Chattanooga. The shadow of night crept up the cliff until only her figure stood in sunlight, with her hair like a golden halo about her face. At that moment came on the wind the sound of bells—wedding-bells. Pressing her hands to her ears, the girl walked to the edge of the rock, and a few seconds later her lifeless form rolled through the bushes at its foot into the road. At her funeral the people came from far and near to offer sympathy to the mother, garbed in black, and the father, with his hair turned white, but the lawyer from Chattanooga was not there.
The name of Indian Maiden's Cliff—applied to a precipice that hangs above the wild ravine of Stony Clove, in the Catskills—commemorates the sequel to an elopement from her tribe of an Indian girl and her lover. The parents and relatives had opposed the match with that fatal fatuity that appears to be characteristic of story-book Indians, and as soon as word of her flight came to the village they set off in chase. While hurrying through the tangled wood the young couple were separated and the girl found herself on the edge of the cliff. Farther advance was impossible. Her pursuers were close behind. She must yield or die. She chose not to yield, and, with a despairing cry, flung herself into the shadows.
Similar to this is the tale of Lover's Leap in the
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