adjacent grounds. The line of ancient college buildings in the "Old Brick Row" facing the Public Green has quite a venerable and scholarly aspect, one of the best of them, "Connecticut Hall," having been built with money raised by a lottery and from the proceeds of a French prize-ship captured in the colonial wars antedating the Revolution, when Connecticut aided King George by equipping a frigate. This row stretches broadly across the greensward, fronted by stately arching elms arranged in quadruple lines. Besides the great value of its lands and buildings, Yale College has an invested fund of some one million seven hundred thousand dollars, and its annual income, including the tuition fees, is about three hundred thousand dollars. The Peabody Museum contains one of the best collections of curiosities in the country, and the Yale Library is extensive. There are scores of buildings of all kinds-from the grand academic halls down to the windowless and mysterious mausoleum that I am told entombs the "Skull-and-Bones Society "-occupying the spacious grounds of this famous college.

THE LAND OF QUINNEPIACK.

The Indian name for the region round about New Haven was Quinnepiack, and to this day the placid Quinnepiack River flows through a deep valley past the noted "East Rock" into the harbor. Old John Davenport was the leader and first pastor of the infant colony that settled here an earnest preacher, revered by the Indians as "so big study man," who delivered the original sermon on founding the town from the text: "Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars." From this came the original scheme of government for the colony by the seven leading church members, who were known as the "seven pillars." It has since greatly grown, probably in some other things than in the quality of its piety, and, like all these Connecticut towns, is a busy hive of indus

THE LAND OF QUINNEPIACK.

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