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grand amphitheatre upon Lake Mahkeenac nestling there, with Monument Mountain closing the distant view beyond. Villas perch upon all the terraces and knolls surrounding this famous "Bowl," and one modest and older mansion overlooks it among so much modern magnificence-Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables." Here he lived for many years in a quaint little red wooden house, looking as if built in bits, and having a glorious view for miles away across the lake. Over the hills we go, up and down the terraces that widely encircle the "Bowl," now under arching canopies of elms, then through the forest, past little lakelets, enjoying fascinating views in all directions, around the broad basin formed by the hills as we encircle the placid lake. Red-topped and white-topped villas occupy all the points of vantage. Here live the New York bankers and merchants in palaces that have cost princely sums, and to this enchanting place hie the wealthy to rest after the seashore and Saratoga seasons. From one of the most noted of these villas, on "Lanier Hill" high above the "Bowl" and its surrounding vales, we can overlook several lakes and study the rock-ribbed structure of this charming region, thrust up in crags and layers of white marble, while the walls and stone-work of the buildings are also mostly white, contrasting prettily with the green sward and foliage. Here is scanned the Laurel Lake, and the village of Lee beyond nestling in the deep valley along the winding Housatonic. Its tall white church-spire rises among the trees as we descend steeply upon it. The surrounding slopes, as elsewhere, are covered with villas, and the marble-quarries and paper-mills have made the fortune of the town. These paper-mills do a great work, but the Lee quarries are the most noted in America. The pure white marble, cut out of deep fissures alongside the Housatonic, has built some of our most famous structures, including the Capitol at Washington, our Philadelphia City Hall, and the Drexel Building.

THE ANCIENT MUHHEKANEWS.

The Stockbridge village is across an intervening ridge beyond the "Bowl." The wayward Housatonic encircles Lee and flows athwart the valley toward the west, thus making a meadow on which this pretty hamlet stands. Turkeys walk about and pumpkins lie in the fields preparing for the feast of turkey and pumpkin pie at the autumn Thanksgiving—the great Yankee holiday that has spread all over the country. Monument Mountain and Bear Mountain guard the smaller "bowl," into which we now come, with Stockbridge scattered through it upon the winding river-banks. "Field's Hill" overlooks the town, where Cyrus W. Field and his brothers were born and still have villas on the paternal estate. The quiet town seems almost asleep beneath its embowering elms under the rim of the hills upon the river-bordered plain. It was the Indian village of "Housatonnuc" in colonial days, and upon its green street stands a solid square stone tower, with a clock and chimes, bearing the inscription, "This memorial marks the spot where stood the little church in which John Sergeant preached to the Indians in 1739." It was the gift of David Dudley Field to his birthplace. The "Muhhekanew" tribe, or "the people of the great moving waters," afterward called the Stockbridge Indians, were early discovered by the Puritans, and Sergeant was sent a missionary among them, laboring fifteen years. Jonathan Edwards, the renowned metaphysician, succeeded him after the differences with the church at Northampton, and came out into the Berkshire wilderness, living among these Indians six years and preaching by the help of interpreters. The modern clergy may be surprised to learn that this great pastor labored here for an annual salary of thirtyfive dollars, with ten dollars extra paid in fuel. But he lived happily at Stockbridge, which the late Governor Andrew called one of "the delicious surprises of Berk

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shire," and in one of the oldest houses in the village wrote his celebrated work on The Freedom of the Will. He left in 1757 to become president of Princeton College, and died the next year. His Indian flock hold a wonderful tradition. A great people, they said, crossed deep waters from a far distant continent in the north-west, and by many pilgrimages marched to the seashore and the valley of the Hudson. Here they built cities and lived until a famine scattered them and many died. Wandering for years in quest of a precarious living, they lost their arts and manners, and part of them settled on the Housatonic, where the Puritans afterward found them. In these later days they are dispersed, whither no one can tell, but on the slope of a hill adjoining the river remains their old graveyard, with a rugged, weather-worn shaft surmounting a stone pile to mark it. The memory of Edwards is preserved by a granite obelisk in front of his little wooden house.

These are all gems set in mosaic among the elms along the village street, and, including a beautiful memorial church, they have been given by sons and daughters of Stockbridge who have gone elsewhere, but have not forgotten their nativity. To us in Philadelphia a memory of Stockbridge is the fact that it was the birthplace of John S. Hart, long the principal of the Central High School in its best days.

GREAT BARRINGTON.

Through the gorges we follow down the Housatonic River, the mountain-ridges pressing closely. The stream feeds more mills, but its sharp curves that make such pretty views have given a difficult task to the railwaybuilder. The water pours down frequent white-marble dams and bubbles over rapids, with steep tree-clad slopes hemming in the banks, while the jagged sides and rough crags of Monument Mountain rise high to the eastward. This was the "Fisher's Nest" of the Stockbridge tribe,

and as Hawthorne, from his seven-gabled home, looked out upon its gnarled and forest-covered walls of rocks, he described its full autumnal glories as "a headless sphinx wrapped in a rich Persian shawl." A cairn found on the summit gave the mountain its name, the tradition telling of a mythical Indian maiden who jumped from the top, and her tribe when they passed by, throwing stones on the spot, thus built the cairn. Some one has certainly thrown many stones all around this rugged mountain piled up with marble crags in a region having abrupt peaks starting out over the whole surface about it. Monument Mountain's long ridge finally falls off, and then the lowlands broaden to the southward as the Housatonic winds in wider channel to Great Barrington. Here stands another typical New England village spreading along its broad elm-embowered street, with Mount Everett grandly rising over its south-western border and another galaxy of peaks encircling the basin wherein the place is built. Less attractive only than Lenox and Stockbridge, it possesses the finest countryhouse in Berkshire—a mansion illustrating the affection the New England emigrant always bears the home of youth. Mark Hopkins went from here to California to make a fortune and die. His childless widow, also from this village, with thirty million dollars at her disposal, determined to rear a memorial on the farm where she spent her childhood days. On the meadow, almost at the riverside, she has built a home of the native marbles of the Berkshire Hills exceeding in costliness and magnificence any other private dwelling in this country. As the building grew she became so enamored of it that she finally took the architect for a second husband. She regularly travels across the continent between her winter California home and her summer home here. High above the noble house rises the special Berkshire hill of Great Barrington, and to its summit we are taken to be shown the view beyond. The solid sides of broad Mount Everett stand

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up a few miles away, the sentinel guarding the south-western corner of Massachusetts, and to the westward are stretched the lands of New York beyond the Taghkanic range to the distant Catskills across the valley of the Hudson. A little way southward is the Connecticut boundary with successive ranges of hills. Productive valleys have herds grazing along the river almost beneath our feet, and the pleasant villages of Egremont and Sheffield nestle under the shadow of Everett. The marble of the Sheffield quarries built our Girard College. Thus have we followed the picturesque Housatonic from its sources near Pittsfield among these glorious Berkshire Hills, and from this elevated perch can still trace it far from us as it flows away through the winding vales into Connecticut, to be ultimately swallowed by Long Island Sound beyond the peaceful plain of Old Stratford.

XXI.

TRAVERSING THE OLD BAY STATE.

THE Boston and Albany Railroad is one of the main routes of travel between the Atlantic seaboard and the West, and is a prominent "Vanderbilt line." It crosses Massachusetts from Berkshire to the coast, going through the chief interior cities of the "Old Bay State." It was one of the earliest railways built, being in progress from 1833 to 1842, when the line was opened to Albany, and the project was derided as chimerical. A leading Boston. newspaper of that day, the Courier, said it could only be built at "an expense of little less than the market value of the whole territory of Massachusetts, and, if practicable, every person of common sense knows it would be as useless as a railroad from Boston to the moon." Yet it was built and prospered, and the great Commonwealth, to break