a life-insurance company, and many other institutions of the solid community which is blessed with this honored memory.

Hartford, in proportion to its population, is the wealthiest American city. It is financially great, particularly in insurance, there being no less than twenty-one fire and life companies, some of them of great strength and doing business in all parts of the world. Its Charter Oak Insurance Company dwells in a granite palace on Main Street, and some others, such as the Hartford, the Ætna, the Connecticut Mutual, and the Phoenix, also have fine buildings. These companies have a widespread business, and some of them enormous capitals and assets. The city also has many strong banks, and is renowned for its numerous charitable institutions, its extensive book-publishing houses, and its educational foundations, the most noted being Trinity College. From the elevated position of this college there is a grand view across the intervening valley to the hills of Farmington and westward to Talcott Mountain. The vast wealth of the Hartford people has enabled them to enrich its picturesque suburbs, so that an extensive district around. it is covered with magnificent villas, making a semi-rural residential section that is unsurpassed by any other New England city. Arching elms, as everywhere else, embower here the lawn-bordered avenues that stretch for long distances, and in many localities the superb hedges impart quite an English air. Some of the splendid suburban homes of the "Queen City" are perfect gems of artistic construction and attractive decoration, the evidences of the wealth of the people being shown on all sides. There is also a devotion to art, the galleries of the Wadsworth Atheneum having a fine collection. Among the relics kept here are General Putnam's sword and the old Indian king Philip's club.

But the citizen whom Hartford seems to hold in highest esteem is the late Colonel Samuel Colt, who invented the

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revolving pistol. He was a native of Hartford, and his remains rest under a noble monument in Cedar Hill Cemetery. A beautiful little brownstone Gothic chapel, the "Church of the Good Shepherd," has been built in his memory. Colt when a boy ran away from home and went to sea, and is said to have there conceived the idea of his great invention. During several years he sought with indifferent success to establish an arms manufactory. He did not prosper until 1852, when he started a factory in Hartford, and with the great demand for small-arms then stimulated by the opening of the California gold-mines and the exploration of the Western Plains, and afterward vastly expanded by the necessities created by the Civil War, his factory grew into an enormous business. "The Colt Arms Company," which was for many years managed by General Franklin, is the chief industrial establishment of Hartford, having very large buildings adjacent to the Connecticut River that are filled with the latest appliances and machinery for making the most approved arms of all kinds. These mills, however, thrive only on war, and it may gratify our Peace Society to know that they are now running very light, though still making a goodly number to supply a demand for pistols and rifles that is constant. They employ a small army of very intelligent-looking workmen, who appear to be in advance of the average in intellectuality. Throughout these vast works there is everywhere seen a reminder of the great Hartford inventor in the representation of his family coat-of-arms, the heraldic "colt rampant," which is stamped upon all the arms and impressed and reproduced upon all the adornments of this greatest Hartford establishment.

XVIII.

THE CONNECTICUT INTERVALES.

A SHORT distance north of Hartford is the imaginary line that marks the Massachusetts southern boundary. We follow up the Connecticut Valley, which is here a broad and comparatively level region of good land, with the placid river flowing through it. We have temporarily left the region of sand and stones so well developed in the "Nutmeg State," and come into the rich meadows of Mattaneag, a fertile intervale, where the fences are built of wood, as stones seem scarce. Its entrepôt is Windsor, an agricultural colony started by John Worham, who, the local historian says, was the first New England pastor who used notes in preaching. Whether he defied the "blue laws" by using tobacco we are not told, but his colony is to-day a great tobacco-growing section, through which the Farmington River flows down from the western hills. The Enfield Rapids of the Connecticut are here, and a canal formerly used to take the river-craft around the obstruction now gives ample water-power to many paper and other mills that make the town of Windsor Locks. The river flows swiftly over its pebbly bed, being dammed above to divert some of the water into the canal. The Hazardville PowderWorks are not far away, the greatest gunpowder-factory in America, and Thompsonville is adjacent, a maker of carpets to a prodigious extent. Then we cross the boundary into the "Old Bay State," the chief New England commonwealth, also largely a nest of factories, and the leading State of the Union in the manufacture of cotton and woollen goods, boots and shoes, leather and paper. Massachusetts, like Connecticut, has, it is true, in the Housatonic and Connecticut Valleys some productive soils, but the greater portion of the more elevated lands, as well as the

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long sandy coasts, gives no encouragement to the agriculturist. Its surface is diversified, the Vermont Green Mountains coming down through the western portion in the Taghkanic and Hoosac ranges of Berkshire county, that are parallel, and form the famous Berkshire Hills. In the north-west corner the most elevated summit, " Old Graylock," rises nearly thirty-six hundred feet, while in the south-west Mount Everett exceeds twenty-six hundred feet. The foothills from the eastern verge of the Hoosacs slope into the beautiful Connecticut Valley, while near the centre of the State that river forces a passage below Northampton between two detached ridges, the Mount Tom range on its western bank rising thirteen hundred feet in one place, and Mount Holyoke on the eastern bank, eleven hundred and twenty feet. These are the southern outposts of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Farther eastward are detached peaks, the chief being Mount Wachusett.

SPRINGFIELD AND ITS ARMORY.

Just north of the Massachusetts boundary the river sweeps grandly around in approaching the town of Springfield, built on the eastern bank and spreading for a long distance up the slopes of the adjacent hills. This is one of the busiest and most prosperous cities of Massachusetts, being an important railway-junction, where the lines along the Connecticut Valley cross the route from Boston to Albany and the West, and being also a huge factory, especially for the making of arms. The Puritan missionary shepherd, William Pynchon, led his hardy flock to this Indian land of Agawam in 1636, and the statue of Miles Morgan, a noted soldier of that early time, stands, matchlock in hand, in heroic bronze on the public square. Heretofore I have referred to the great amount of firearms-making that is conducted in New England, where all kinds of arms are made, and literally for all the world. Springfield has among its numerous factories two enormous military

establishments. I have noticed for a good while past that in shooting affrays and suicides, as well as in those unfortunate cases where somebody "didn't know it was loaded," the weapon is usually a "Smith and Wesson." It is at Springfield that the "Smith and Wesson Company" makes its pistols, in works that seem big enough to provide the means of speedily annihilating a good deal of the surplus population of the globe. At Springfield also is established the United States National Armory. This enormous factory, which makes the arms for the United States army, occupies an extensive enclosure on Armory Hill, up to which the surface gradually slopes from the river, so that it gives an admirable view over the town. The chief buildings stand around a quadrangle, making a pleasant stretch of lawn with regular rows of trees crossing it. A few cannon are scattered about and point toward the entrance-gates, to give it a military air, and hundreds of men in the shops are making the Springfield breech-loading rifle, the standard weapon of the army. All the parts are constructed by automatic machines, some of which are most ingenious mechanisms. Very intelligent workmen are employed, and many an old man is here who has grown gray in the service, “rotation in office" not being fashionable in the armory. These Springfield rifles are packed twenty in a case, and most of them are forwarded to the arsenal at Rock Island on the Mississippi River, which is the base of supplies for the Indian country and the Western frontier, where most of the army is stationed. The laboring day in this establishment is eight hours, from 8 A. M. to 5 P. M., with an hour's rest at noon, but all wages are paid by the piece. The prosperity of the town largely depends upon the armory, which employs so many of its people, and has* been in active operation almost all the time since the colonial days. It was here that most of the arms were made for the Revolutionary army and the cannon were cast that helped defeat Burgoyne at Saratoga. The armory as seen