whiteness, where the thunderbolt

Hath smitten them."

GREAT BARRINGTON.

To the southward farther, the widening Housatonic circles about the valley, bordered with willows and alders, and hidden frequently by cliffs and forests. Hills terrace the horizon, with mountain peaks among them. Through the gorges the road follows down the circling river, which constantly turns more mill-wheels, its waters pouring over frequent white marble dams and bubbling upon rapids, with steep tree-clad slopes adorning the banks and making attractive views. Monument Mountain's long ridge gradually falls off, and the intervale broadens as the Housatonic winds in wider channel to Great Barrington. This is another typical New England village, embowered by the stateliest of elms, spreading along its broad green-bordered street, with a galaxy of hills encircling the intervale in which it stands, and lofty Mount Everett rising grandly over its southwestern verge. To the eastward is the special hill of Great Barrington, giving the town its name. Beecher described it as "one of those places which one never enters without wishing never to leave." William Cullen Bryant for several years, ending with 1825, was the town clerk of Great Barrington, and the records of that time are in his handwriting; his house is still preserved. For a quarter of a century Dr. Samuel Hopkins lived here, the hero of Mrs. Stowe's novel, the Minister's Wooing. On the lowlands by the river is the costliest country-house in the Berkshires, Kellogg Terrace, built by Mrs. Hopkins-Searles, a magnificent structure of blue and white marbles, with red-tiled roofs, and most elaborately fitted up, upon which $1,500,000 was expended. It is carefully concealed from view from the village street by a massive stone wall and well-arranged trees. This mansion principally illustrates the affection the New England emigrant always bears for the home of youth. Mark Hopkins went away from the Berkshires to California to make a fortune and die. His childless widow, a native of Great Barrington, had $30,000,000, and came back to live on the farm where she had spent her childhood. She determined to rear a memorial, and built this French-Gothic palace of the native Berkshire marbles, exceeding at the time, in costliness and magnificence, any other private dwelling outside of New York City. As the building gradually grew, she became so enamored of it and its designer that she took the architect, Mr. Searles, for a second husband. Then she died, and he became its possessor. Yet it cannot be seen, except by climbing up a high hill to the eastward, where one can look down upon its red-tiled roofs on the low-lying meadow almost by the river side. The Congregational Church of Great Barrington has the Hopkins Memorial Manse, regarded as the finest parsonage in the United States, which cost $100,000 to build.

Following farther down the Housatonic, the village of Sheffield, another domain of marble quarries, is reached, with the same broad, quiet, green-bordered and elm-shaded village street, and famed for having furnished the marble to build Girard College and its magnificent colonnade at Philadelphia. The "Sheffield Elm" in the southern part of the town, a noble tree of great age, was given fame by the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." To the westward is the broad and solid mass of Mount Everett, often called Mount Washington, the southern outpost of the Taghkanic range, and the sentinel guarding the southwestern corner of Massachusetts, as Old Graylock guards the northwest corner. This mountain rises over twenty-six hundred feet, the "Dome of the Taghkanics." From its summit can be surveyed to the westward the valley of the Hudson, while beyond, at the horizon, the distant Catskills hang, in the words of Dr. Hitchcock, "like the curtains of the sky." The Connecticut boundary is not far away, and beyond it, southward, are successive ranges of hills. The Housatonic winds through productive valleys, with herds quietly grazing, and tobacco and other crops growing. This is in the town of Mount Washington, which was part of the great Livingston Manor that stretched in front of the mountain over to the Hudson, and the first settlers were Dutch, who came up from that valley. This region was the scene of the close of Shays' Rebellion in 1787, the insurgents who had convulsed western Massachusetts, and attacked and plundered Stockbridge, being chased down here by the troops, and a considerable number killed and wounded before they were dispersed.

TO SALISBURY AND BEYOND.

The southwestern corner of Massachusetts, projecting westward into New York outside the Connecticut boundary, is known as Boston Corner. To the southward, in the northwestern corner of Connecticut, is Salisbury, where the Taghkanic range falls away into lower hills. Beecher described this country as a constant succession of hills swelling into mountains, and of mountains flowing down into hills. This is a quiet region, formerly a producer of iron ores, and it was early settled by the Dutch, who came over from the Hudson in 1720. They were a timid race, however, fearing the rigors of climate, and, coming thus to the edge of what looked like an Alpine land of dreariness beyond, they would not venture farther into the forbidding hills. The mountainous region to the north and east they inscribed on their maps as a large white vacant space, which they coolly named "Winterberg." The township has two noted ravines, solitary, rugged and attractive, and both containing cascades. In one to the westward is the celebrated Bash-Bish Falls, and the other to the northward is Sage's Ravine, just beyond it being Norton's Falls. The Bash-Bish is said to have got its name in imitation of running, falling waters. It descends nearly five hundred feet in cataracts and rapids, the finest cascades in the Berkshires, and then flows out westward to the Hudson. The Housatonic, going southward through Salisbury, plunges down its Great Falls over rocky ledges for sixty feet descent, making a tremendous noise and a fine display. To the eastward of the Housatonic Valley, at an elevation of eleven hundred feet, on a broad plateau, is Litchfield, consisting chiefly of two broad, tree-shaded streets crossing at right angles, the chief buildings fronting on the central village Green. On the southwestern outskirts is Bantam Lake, the largest in Connecticut, covering a little over a square mile of surface. The most famous house in Litchfield, which has been moved, however, from its original location, is unpretentious, the old-time wooden mansion in which Rev. Lyman Beecher lived when pastor here, from 1810 to 1826, and where was born the famous authoress, Harriet Beecher, in 1812, who married Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, and the famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, in 1813. In the Wolcott House at Litchfield was born Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, he and his father both having been Connecticut Governors. To this house was brought, in the Revolution, the leaden statue of King George III., which stood on the Bowling Green of New York, to be melted into bullets. These were the favorite Indian hunting-grounds of Bantam around the lake, and when Litchfield was first settled, about 1720, the village was surrounded by a palisade, lest the savages should return to their coveted region to take forcible possession. Litchfield for a half-century after the Revolution had the most noted law school in America. To the northward, at Wolcottville, where there are now large factories, lived Captain John Brown, a noted Revolutionary soldier, and here was born in 1800 his grandson, "Old John Brown of Osawatomie."

Yet farther southward, but still among the