crags and layers of white marble. The walls and stonework of the buildings are chiefly white, contrasting prettily with the foliage and greensward. Here is seen the Laurel Lake, and beyond is the village of Lee, nestling in the deep valley along the winding Housatonic, its tall white church spire rising among the trees, yet far down among the surrounding hills. All the adjacent slopes are covered with villas, and the marble-quarries and paper-mills have made the town's fortune. There are about four thousand people, and the Lee quarries are among the most noted in America. The pure white marble, cut out of deep fissures alongside the Housatonic, has built many famous structures, including the two largest buildings in the country, the Capitol at Washington and the Philadelphia City Hall, and also St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Lee was named in the Revolution, after "Light Horse Harry" of Virginia.

STOCKBRIDGE AND ITS INDIANS.

Across an intervening ridge beyond the "Bowl" is the village of Stockbridge. The wayward Housatonic encircles Lee, and flows athwart the valley towards the west, thus making a meadow on which this pleasant settlement stands. In the autumn, turkeys strut about, and pumpkins lie profusely in the fields, preparing for the annual New England feast of roast turkey and pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving Day—the great Puritan holiday that has spread over the country. Monument Mountain and Bear Mountain to the southward guard the smaller glen into which the highway leads, with Stockbridge scattered through it upon the winding river banks. This region was settled earlier than Lenox, the first colonists from the Connecticut Valley venturing out upon the Indian trail across the Hoosac range in 1725 to take up a grant in the Southern Berkshires. They found here, on the river bank, the Mohican Indian village of Housatonnuc, and established relations of the greatest friendliness. Field's Hill overlooks the town, where Cyrus W. Field, of Atlantic cable memory, and his brothers were born. Stockbridge has been described as one of "the delicious surprises of Berkshire," quiet and seemingly almost asleep beneath its embowering meadow elms under the rim of the hills upon the river-bordered plain. Upon the wide 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." This handsome tower, standing in front of the Congregational Church, was the gift of David Dudley Field to his birthplace.

These Indians called themselves the Muhhekanews, or "the people of the great moving waters," and Sergeant was sent as a missionary among them, laboring fifteen years. They were afterwards called the Stockbridge Indians. Jonathan Edwards, the renowned metaphysician, who had differences with the church at Northampton, succeeded Sergeant, and came out into the Berkshire wilderness, living among these Indians and preaching by the aid of interpreters. This great pastor lived happily at Stockbridge for six years on an annual salary of $35, with $10 extra paid in fuel, and in one of the oldest houses of the village wrote his celebrated work on The Freedom of the Will. He left Stockbridge to become President of Princeton College in New Jersey. The Stockbridge Indians had a wonderful tradition. They said that a great people crossed deep waters from a far-distant continent in the northwest, 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 afterwards for years in quest of a precarious living, they lost their arts and manners, and part of them settled in the village on the Housatonic, where the Puritans found them. They gladly received Sergeant's ministry, and he baptized over a hundred of them, translating the New Testament and part of the Old into their language. When Edwards came, in 1751, there were one hundred and fifty Indian families, and but six English families. Many were in the Continental army in the Revolution, and a company of these Indians won distinction in the battle of White Plains, near New York. They were dispersed in later days, some going to Western New York and others to the far West; but on the slope of a hill adjoining the river remains their old graveyard, a rugged weather-worn shaft surmounting a stone pile to mark it.

Monument to Jonathan Edwards, Stockbridge, Mass.

Upon the green village main street is Edwards' little old wooden house, having three small windows above the ponderous door. It is now called "Edwards Hall," and a granite obelisk out in front, erected by his descendants in 1871, preserves the memory of the great divine. Over opposite is the venerable Sedgwick Mansion, the home of the famous Sedgwick family. Farther up the street is the Cemetery, where the most interesting feature is the enclosure set apart for their tombs, the graves being arranged in circles around the central tomb of Judge Theodore Sedgwick, the founder. He was a native of Hartford, born in 1746, migrated to Sheffield in Berkshire, and finally settled at Stockbridge after the Revolution, becoming one of the leading statesmen of New England, prominent in the old Federal party, Member of Congress and Senator from Massachusetts, and Speaker of the House. He was subsequently made Judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, dying in office in 1813. His children and descendants surround his grave, among them his daughter, the distinguished authoress, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, born at Stockbridge in 1789, who died in 1867.

A few miles to the southeast is Monument Mountain, the Indian "Fisher's Nest," one of the most curious and attractive of the Berkshire hills on account of its position and form, although the summit is not very high, less than thirteen hundred feet. Its rock formations are fine, being of white quartz, and on the eastern side is a detached cliff with a huge pinnacle nearly a hundred feet high, known as the "Pulpit." Hawthorne greatly admired this mountain, at which he looked from his boudoir window across the lake, and in its autumn hues he said it appeared like "a headless sphinx wrapped in a rich Persian shawl," seen across a valley that was "a vast basin filled with sunshine as with wine." The mountain received its modern name from a cairn found on the summit, the tradition telling of a mythical Indian maiden who got crossed in love, and as a consequence jumped off the topmost cliff, being dashed to pieces. Her tribe, when they passed that way, each added a stone to the pile, thus building the cairn. There are many stones thrown all around this peculiarly rugged mountain, which is piled up with white marble crags in a region where abrupt peaks are seen almost everywhere. In among these cliffs is the Ice Glen, a cold and narrow cleft where ice may be found in midsummer, it is so secluded from sunshine. The appearance of Monument Mountain made a strong impression on William Cullen Bryant, who thus described it: