115 try. Its many mills make agricultural machinery, corsets, scales, carriages, organs, and pianos, with a vast amount of "Yankee notions of various kinds and miscellaneous hardware. There is also some commerce, chiefly with the West Indies and along the coast, and numerous railways fetch in the trade of the surrounding country. New Haven has tastefully adorned suburbs, where the hills and elevated roadways afford charming prospects. In the outlying regions, however, the great attractions are the two bold and striking promontories known as the East and West Rocks, which are high buttresses of trap rock lifting themselves from the plain upon which New Haven is chiefly built, one on each side of the town, in a magnificent array of opposition, and each rising over four hundred feet. Some of the inhabitants think these grim precipices in remote ages may have sentinelled the outflow of the Connecticut River between their broad and solid bases to the sound. Each of these tremendous cliffs is the termination of a long ridge or mountain-range that comes down from the far North. The Green Mountain outcropping, stretching southward from Vermont, is represented in the West Rock, while the East Rock terminates what is known as the Mount Tom range, through which the Connecticut River breaks a passage up in Massachusetts, and part of which rises a thousand feet in the "Blue Hills of Southington," making the most elevated lands in the State of Connecticut. The summits of these two great rocks, thus projected out toward Long Island Sound, afford grand views. In a cave upon the West Rock the three regicides, Goffe, Whalley, and Dixwell, were in hiding, and the three avenues leading to this rock from the city are named after them. Dixwell's bones repose upon the Public Green at the back of the "Centre Church," which stands in the row of three churches occupying the middle of the green, which was the common graveyard of colonial New Haven. The approach to the East Rock, going out Orange Street, is grand. The rock is elevated high above the marshy valley of Mill River winding about its base, and reared upon the topmost crag is a noble monument erected by New Haven in memory of the soldiers who fell in the Civil War-a magnificent shaft overlooking the town and valley that is seen from afar. The whole surface of the East Rock is reserved as a public park. Upon the face of the cliff the perpendicular strata of reddish-brown trap stand bolt upright. There are well-laid roads of easy gradient gradually rising through the bordering ravines and amid the forest until the top is reached, where from this elevated outpost there is a charming view. Far over the flat plain to the southward spreads the town, with its little harbor stretching out into the sound, and beyond, across the silvery waters, there can be seen the distant hazy shores of Long Island, twenty-five miles away. The numerous wooden houses nestle among the trees, and the two little crooked rivers coming out of the deep valleys on either side of the great rock wind onward to mingle their waters in the harbor. Smoke ascends from the numerous factory-chimneys down by the waterside, while all around the country is dotted with flourishing villages. This is the noble outlook over the "City of Elms" and its pleasant surroundings as seen from this grand outpost rising high above the plain upon which the Academic City is built. FROM NEW HAVEN TO HARTFORD. Almost under the shadow of the towering East Rock is laid the railway connecting New Haven with Hartford, and thence it passes northward along the valley of Quinnepiack River over flat meadow-land bordered by blue hills. Brickmaking seems to be the chief industry on these meadows, and they are prolific grass-growers, judging by the hundreds of little haystacks dotted over them. Soon, however, sterility is developed, for vast sand-deposits overlie the soil, and farming here must be a discouraging occupation. These FROM NEW HAVEN TO HARTFORD. 117 moors, with their sands and sloughs and scrub timber, demonstrate the plight of the average Connecticul settler, for, being unable to wrest a living out of the land, he either has to go to making "Yankee notions" or emigrate or starve. Wallingford is passed, its church-towers crowning the hill to the eastward of the railway and watching over a population largely made up of German-silver and plated-ware manufacturers. When this town was founded John Davenport was invited to come out from New Haven and conduct the religious services. He came and preached the initial sermon from a text regarded as appropriate to the locality: "My beloved hath a vineyard on a very fruitful hill." Beyond, and nestling under the shadow of the "Blue Hills of Southington," is Meriden. These hills rise high above its western and northern borders in the West Peak and Mount Lamentation. Here is another active hive of factories fringed around with the neat wooden dwellings of their operatives, while the villas of their owners are scattered about in pleasant places upon the steep declivities of the adjacent hills. These people are industrious workers in iron and steel, in bronze and brass, in making tin, Britannia, and electro-plated silverware. The chief establishment of the place is the well-known Meriden Britannia Company, its enormous mills being spread for a long distance along the railway and making the greatest manufactory of its kind in the world, sending out over five million dollars' worth of its wares in a year. Meriden and Berlin, a short distance northward, are the headquarters of the peripatetic Connecticut tin-peddler, who starts out laden with all kinds of tin pans and pots and other bright and useful utensils to wander over the country and charm the rural housewife with his bargains. Berlin began the first American manufacture of tinware in the last century. While it bears an ambitious German name, it was started by a colony of shrewd Yankees. These New England villages-and there are hundreds like them-all seem to be cast in the same mould and to have similar characteristics. There are in each the beautiful central public green shaded by rows of stately elms; the tall-spired churches; the village graveyard, usually sloping down a hillside, with the lines of white gravestones supplemented in the modern interments by more elaborate monuments; the attractive wooden houses nestling amid foliage and surrounded by gardens and flower-beds, the homes of the people; and the big factories that give them employment. Some of these villages, being larger than others, may show a greater development in various ways, but, excepting in size, all are substantially alike. The oxteam slowly plods along the road, and the scanty crop in the field shows how the sand and stones have choked the efforts of the husbandman. And, thus gliding along past village and mill, there soon comes into view the distant gilded dome of the Connecticut State Capitol, and finally the broad fronts of the buildings of Trinity College surmounting Rocky Hill. The train runs among a labyrinth of factories down upon the edge of the little Park River, and soon halts at the station, under the shadow of the Capitol, in the centre of the city of Hartford, on the Connecticut River. XVII. THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY. THE noted Adraien Block, the Dutch navigator, built at the Battery in New York in 1614 the first ship ever constructed in New York harbor. The four little huts he put up to house his crew and builders were among the first structures of the early colony. His blunt-pointed Knickerbocker yacht of sixteen tons he named the "Onrest," and THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY. 119 in her started on a voyage of discovery through Hellgate into Long Island Sound. To him belongs the honor of discovering on this important voyage the principal river of New England, and after his explorations he rested on the land that still bears his name-Block Island. The sources of the Connecticut River are in the highlands bordering Canada at an elevation of more than sixteen hundred feet above the sea, and it flows south-west over four hundred miles to Long Island Sound. The Indians called it "Quonektakat," or the "Long River," and hence the name and that of the "Nutmeg State" wherein it finds its mouth. The river has always been noted for beautiful scenery, and has many cataracts, among them South Hadley in Massachusetts and Enfield in Connecticut, furnishing abundant water-power to the mills lining the banks. It flows into the sound thirty-three miles east of New Haven, at Saybrook. The first English patent for lands on these coasts was granted to Lord Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke, and, this being the earliest settlement under their auspices, it bears their double name. The original colony was planned with great care, as the place was expected to become the home of distinguished men, and a fort was built on a hill at the river's mouth. According to the story told by the historian, it was to Saybrook that Cromwell, Pym, Hampden, and Haselrig, with their party of malcontent colonists, intended to emigrate when they were stopped by King Charles. Had this movement been consummated it might have greatly changed the subsequent momentous events in England. A little west of the old fort there was a public square laid out, where, according to the town plan, their houses were to have been built. I have already mentioned that Yale College began in Saybrook, its first building being a long, narrow, one-story structure looking much like a ropewalk; and this house was afterward removed with the college to New Haven. The founders of this great educational establishment were pious men, who |