"'Tis like a patient, faithful soulThat, having reached its saintly goal,And seeing others far astrayIn storms of darkness and dismay,Shines out o'er life's tempestuous sea,A beacon to some sheltered lee,—The haven of eternity."
"'Tis like a patient, faithful soulThat, having reached its saintly goal,And seeing others far astrayIn storms of darkness and dismay,Shines out o'er life's tempestuous sea,A beacon to some sheltered lee,—The haven of eternity."
"'Tis like a patient, faithful soulThat, having reached its saintly goal,And seeing others far astrayIn storms of darkness and dismay,Shines out o'er life's tempestuous sea,A beacon to some sheltered lee,—The haven of eternity."
"'Tis like a patient, faithful soul
That, having reached its saintly goal,
And seeing others far astray
In storms of darkness and dismay,
Shines out o'er life's tempestuous sea,
A beacon to some sheltered lee,—
The haven of eternity."
The tall Observatory, on its airy steel framework, rises three hundred feet to overlook the wonderful scene. When the top is reached, the first impression made is by the dissonant clangor of the many bands of music below, heard with singular clearness and much more intensity of sound than on the ground. This discord ascends from all sorts of structures, generally having flat pitch-and-gravel roofs, forming a variegated carpet far below. Coney Island stretches along the ocean's edge, with the lines of foaming surf slowly rolling in. To the eastward, at Brighton and Manhattan Beaches, it bends backward like a bow, with semicircular indentations where the sea has made its inroads. To the westward, the curve of the beach is reversed, and the extreme point of the island ends in a knob having a distinctive hook bent back on the northern side. Behind the long and narrow strip of sand there are patches of grass, and much marsh and meadow, spreading away to the northward, and meandering through the marsh can be traced the crooked little tidal creek and series of lagoons separating Coney from the mainland. Far away northward runs the broad tree-bordered Ocean Parkway, with the hills of Prospect Park and the tombs and foliage of Greenwood Cemetery hiding Brooklyn, and closing the view at the distant horizon. Various railways stretch in the same direction, some crossing the bogs on extended trestle-bridges. Many carriages are moving and thousands of people walkingabout in the streets and open spaces beneath us, while upon the ocean side the piers extend out in front, with their steamboats sailing to or from the Narrows to the northward, around the knob and hook at Norton's Point. Far south over the water are the distant Navesink Highlands behind Sandy Hook and the low adjacent New Jersey Coast, gradually blending into the Staten Island hills to the westward. Around from the south to the east is the broad and limitless expanse of ocean, where, in the words of Heinrich Heine:
"The cloudlets are lazily sailingO'er the blue Atlantic sea."
"The cloudlets are lazily sailingO'er the blue Atlantic sea."
"The cloudlets are lazily sailingO'er the blue Atlantic sea."
"The cloudlets are lazily sailing
O'er the blue Atlantic sea."
Far to the eastward, seen across the broad Jamaica Bay, are more low sandy beaches, each with its popular resort, though all pale before the crowning glories of Coney Island. There is Rockaway, with its iron pier and railway connecting with the mainland to the northeast, also Arverne and Edgemere, the distant cottage-studded Long Beach, and the hazy sand-beaches of Far Rockaway. And as we gaze over this wondrous scene down by the water side, the freshening wind gives a pleasant foretaste of old ocean, and recalls the invocation of Barry Cornwall:
"The sea! the sea! the open sea!The blue, the fresh, the ever free!Without a mark, without a bound,It runneth the earth's wide regions round."I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea!I am where I would ever be,With the blue above, and the blue below,And silence wheresoe'er I go."I never was on the dull tame shore,But I loved the great sea more and more."
"The sea! the sea! the open sea!The blue, the fresh, the ever free!Without a mark, without a bound,It runneth the earth's wide regions round."I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea!I am where I would ever be,With the blue above, and the blue below,And silence wheresoe'er I go."I never was on the dull tame shore,But I loved the great sea more and more."
"The sea! the sea! the open sea!The blue, the fresh, the ever free!Without a mark, without a bound,It runneth the earth's wide regions round.
"The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth's wide regions round.
"I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea!I am where I would ever be,With the blue above, and the blue below,And silence wheresoe'er I go.
"I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be,
With the blue above, and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe'er I go.
"I never was on the dull tame shore,But I loved the great sea more and more."
"I never was on the dull tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more."
IX.
THE ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.
The Isle of Nassau—Captain Adraien Blok—Roodt Eylandt—Block Island—Great South Bay—Great South Beach—Jamaica Bay—Hempstead Bay—Fire Island and its Lighthouse—Shinnecock—Quogue-East Hampton—Lyman Beecher—John Howard Payne—Garden City—Jericho—Elias Hicks—Flushing Bay—Throgg's Neck—Willett's Point—Little Neck Bay—Great Neck—Sands Point—Harbor Hill—William Cullen Bryant—Oyster Bay—Lloyds' Neck—Nathan Hale—Ronkonkoma Lake—The Wampum Makers—Mamaroneck—Byram River—The Wooden-Nutmeg State—Brother Jonathan—Greenwich—Old Put's Hill—Stamford—Colonel Abraham Davenport—The Dark Day—Norwalk—Sasco Swamp—Fairfield—Pequannock River—Bridgeport—Phineas T. Barnum—Joyce Heth—General Tom Thumb—Jenny Lind—Old Stratford—Milford—New Haven—Quinnepiack—John Davenport—Yale College—Killingworth—Elihu Yale—Steamboat Fulton—East and West Rocks—The Regicides—Wallingford—James Hillhouse—Savin Rock—Saybrook Point—Guilford—Connecticut River—The Sachem's Head—Thimble Islands—Saybrook Platform—Old Saybrook—Thames River—New London—Groton—Silas Deane—Fort Hill—Pequot Hill—Defeat of the Pequots—Pawcatuck—Stonington—Watch Hill Point—Westerly—Orient Point—Plum Island—Plum Gut—Shelter Island—The Gull Islands—The Horse Race—Fisher's Island—Gardiner's Island—Lyon Gardiner—Captain Kidd and his Buried Treasures—Sag Harbor—Montauk Indians—Money Pond—Fort Pond Bay—Montauk Point and its Lighthouse—Ultima Thule—Isle of Manisees—Block Islanders—Whittier—Palatine Wreck.
THE ISLE OF NASSAU.
The first white man who sailed upon Long Island Sound was the bluff old Dutch navigator, Captain Adraien Blok. Desirous of adventure and spoil, he built upon the shore of the Battery, in 1614, the first ship ever constructed at New York, a blunt-pointed Dutch sloop-yacht of sixteen tons, which he named the "Onrest." The four little huts he had upon the shore to house his builders and crew were among the first structures of the early Manhattan colony. Fitting her out, he braved the terrors of the Hell Gate passage and started on a voyage of discovery on Long Island Sound, which he explored throughout. He found the mouth of the principal river of New England, the Connecticut, and coasting around Point Judith, entered Narragansett Bay, and cast anchor before an island with such conspicuously red-clay shores that he called it Roodt Eylandt, or the Red Island, on which Newport now stands. Then he ventured out to sea and found the bluff shores of Block Island, to which he gave his own name. Sated with exploration and loaded with spoil exchanged with the Indians, he then returned to New York and told of his wonderful adventures. His was the first vessel, manned by white men, known to have sailed upon the "Mediterranean of America," as Long Island Sound is popularly called. This grand inland sea is generally from twenty to thirty miles wide, and isenclosed by Long Island, the ancient Isle of Nassau of the Dutch, stretching for one hundred and thirty miles eastward from New York harbor, and being likened to a fish lying upon the water. It has a generally bluff northern shore along the Sound, and the southern coast, which is low and level almost to the eastern extremity, lies nearly due east and west, the island finally breaking into a chain of narrow peninsulas and islands facing the rising sun. The southern border is a continuous line of broad lagoons, separated from the Atlantic by long and narrow sand-bars. The chief lagoon is the Great South Bay, eighty miles long, fronted by the curious formation of the Great South Beach, stretching its entire length, and from one to five miles wide. Upon the outer beaches, and within the lagoons, are a succession of noted seashore resorts. Eastward, beyond Jamaica Bay and Rockaway, is Long Beach, and behind it Hempstead Bay. Then come Jones' Beach and Oak Island, with Massapequa, Amityville and Lindenhurst behind them. Then we are at Babylon and Bayshore, with the Great South Bay fronted by Fire Island, and beyond it the long sand-strip of the Great South Beach. The famous lighthouse of Fire Island, the guiding beacon to New York, one hundred and sixty-eight feet high, is flanked by summer hotels, and its flashing electric light of twenty-three million candlepower is the most powerful on the Atlantic Coast. The Great South Bay spreads far eastward pastPatchogue to Moriches, and then comes Quogue and the Hamptons, where the level land rises into the Shinnecock hills. At the eastern extremity are Amagansett and Montauk. It is a long coast, fringed with lights to point the mariner's way into New York harbor.
They tell us that when the "Onrest" came into the Sound there were thirteen tribes of Indians on Long Island, and that it was the mint for the aborigines, these tribes being the great makers of wampum, the Indian money, for which its beaches and bays furnished the materials. The Montauks, on the eastern end, were the most formidable, and were usually carrying on wars with the Pequots, across the Sound in New England. Out on Shinnecock Neck is the reservation where live the small remnant of the Shinnecock tribe, there being barely a hundred of them, each family in a little house on a little farm it tills. Around Jamaica Bay once lived the Jameko tribe, all now disappeared. At quaintly named Quogue, Daniel Webster used to go fishing and bathing. The hill tops of the Hamptons have perched upon them the picturesque old Dutch windmills which are so attractive to the artists, and at East Hampton still stands the venerable gabled house where lived Lyman Beecher in his earlier ministry, and where his elder children, Catharine and Edward Beecher, were born. Here also passed his boyhood, before he began wandering over the earth,the author ofHome, Sweet Home, John Howard Payne, his father being the village schoolmaster. Payne's quaint little shingled cottage is East Hampton's most sacred memorial. The inhabitants of East Hampton are so much in love with their healthy home, which dates from 1648, that on its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, celebrated in 1898, the announcement was made that they "like East Hampton in a thick fog better than any other place in full sunshine." Eastward from Jamaica, in the western centre of Long Island, are Creedmoor, the noted rifle range, Hempstead, where the New York troops were mobilized in 1898 for the Spanish War, and Garden City, the model suburban town laid out by Alexander T. Stewart, containing a handsome Episcopal Cathedral. Not far away is Hicksville, and to the northward the ancient town of Jericho. This was a tract bought from the Indians by Robert, the brother of Roger Williams, in 1650, which afterwards became a place of Quaker settlement, and here lived and preached for sixty years the famous Elias Hicks, the founder of one of the Quaker sects. He was an opponent of war and of slavery, and rode all over the country as a missionary preacher.
THE NORTHERN LONG ISLAND SHORE.
The steamboat entering Long Island Sound from New York, after passing Hell Gate and crossing Flushing Bay, emerges from the strait of East Riverbetween Throgg's Neck and Whitestone. Upon the end of Throgg's Neck, the jutting point has the graystone ramparts and surmounting earthworks of its ancient guardian, Fort Schuyler. Thrust forward from the Long Island shore, as if to meet it, is the protruding headland of Willett's Point, the Government torpedo station. Here also is an old stone fort down by the waterside, with the extensive ramparts of a modern fort on the bluff above. These are the defensive works commanding the approach to New York from Long Island Sound. In the neighboring havens are favorite anchorages for yachts. Beyond are the expansive waters of the Sound, and far off southward, thrust into the land, are the deep recesses of Little Neck Bay, made famous by its clams, and protected to the eastward by the curiously bifurcated peninsula of Great Neck. The northern Long Island shore is very irregular, and rises into hills. Bold peninsulas and deep bays form it, the surface being corrugated into hillocks and valleys, and penetrated by narrow, shallow harbors. The waves of the Sound have eroded the shores into steep and often precipitous bluffs of gravel, sometimes rising a hundred feet above the water, where narrow beaches, strewn with boulders, border them. At Sands Point is a great peninsula protruding in high sandy bluffs, and behind it is the highest mountain on Long Island, Harbor Hill, rising three hundred and fifty feet above the village of Roslyn, at the head of thedeeply indented Hempstead Harbor, where lived at his home of Cedarmere, for many years, William Cullen Bryant, who now sleeps in the little cemetery.
William Cullen Bryant at "Cedarhurst," Roslyn
William Cullen Bryant at "Cedarhurst," Roslyn
Oyster Bay is deeply indented into the land to the eastward, surrounded by villas and attractive homes, and beyond protrudes the broad, high headland of Lloyds' Neck. This was strongly fortified by the British in the Revolution, and King William IV., then the youthful Duke of Clarence, was at one time an officer of the garrison. It was attacked and captured by the Americans who came over from Connecticut in 1779, the garrison being taken prisoners. Subsequently the British again took possession, and the French from Newport attacked them in 1781, but were repulsed. The hero of Oyster Bay is Captain Nathan Hale of Connecticut, whose statue stands in New York City Hall Park. He had been sent by Washington in 1776, across the Sound, to examine the British defenses of Brooklyn, and, returning, was captured by some Tories at Oyster Bay, and the next day hanged in New York as a spy. Though but twenty-one years old, he met his fate bravely, saying: "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." The British destroyed his farewell letters, the provost-marshal saying "that the rebels should not know they had a man in their army who could die with so much firmness." Oyster Bay was bought in 1653 from the MatinecockIndians by a Pilgrim colony from Sandwich, Massachusetts, and a treaty made at Hartford established it as the boundary between the Dutch of New York and the English of New England. To the eastward are Huntingdon, Setauket and Port Jefferson, popular resorts, and inland are Jerusalem and Islip, the latter settled and named in the seventeenth century by emigrants from old Islip, Oxfordshire, England. Here is the famous Ronkonkoma Lake, so named by the Indians from the white sand of its shores. It is a pretty sheet of fresh water among the forests, about a mile in diameter, of great depth, and has neither inlet nor outlet, though its surface level regularly rises and falls every four years. Here lived the chief wampum makers, the Secatogue and Patchogue tribes. Their wampum mainly consisted of the thick blue part of clam shells, ground into the form of bugle beads, and strung upon cards a foot long.
ENTERING NEW ENGLAND.
Coming out of New York on the northern shore of Long Island Sound, the land is found to be profusely sprinkled with outcropping rocks, a development so universal that to one place the Indians gave the name of Mamaroneck, meaning "the place of rolling-stones." These rocks are gathered into piles for fences, which cross the surface in all directions, and it requires serious effort to till the stony land. About twenty-five miles from New York is the ByramRiver, the Connecticut boundary, the old saying being that New England stretches "from Quoddy Head to Byram River." This original Yankee land, though the smallest section of the United States, has made the deepest impress upon the American character. They have not enjoyed the agricultural advantages of other sections, the bleak climate, poor soil and lavish distribution of rocks and sterility making farming hard work with meagre results, so that the chief Yankee energy has been devoted to the development of manufactures, literature, commerce and the fisheries; this wonderful race who have had to practically live by their wits having admirably succeeded. Crossing Byram River brings us into the "Land of Steady Habits," Connecticut, the "Wooden-Nutmeg State," the special home of "Yankee Notions," which gave the country the original personation of "Brother Jonathan" in Governor Jonathan Trumbull, who was so useful to General Washington. Consulting him in many emergencies, Washington was wont to remark, "Let us hear what Brother Jonathan says," a phrase finally popularly adopted by making him the national impersonation.
Connecticut has the great Puritan College of the country—Yale—ruled by the Congregationalists. It has varied manufactures, to which its abundant water-powers contribute, and in which nearly all its people are engaged, its methods being largely the inventionsof its own sons, of whom three are prominent—Eli Whitney of the cotton-gin, Samuel Colt of the revolver, and Charles Goodyear of india-rubber fame. When De Tocqueville was in America, he was much impressed by the development of the inventive genius, education and political force of the State, which he described as a little yellow spot on the map, and at a dinner he proposed a toast, saying, in his quaint, broken English: "And now for my grand sentiment: Connect-de-coot—de leetle yellow spot dat make de clock-peddler, de school-master and de Senator; de first give you time, de second tell you what to do with him, and de third make your law and civilization." Connecticut gets more patents proportionately than any other State, one to eight hundred inhabitants being annually granted; it makes clocks for all the world, and leads in india-rubber and elastic goods, in hardware and myriads of "Yankee notions," besides being well in the front for sewing-machines, arms and war material. It is named after the chief New England river, and its rugged surface is diversified by long ridges of hills and deep valleys, running generally from north to south, being the prolongation of mountain ranges and intervales that are beyond the northern border. The picturesque Housatonic comes from the Massachusetts Berkshire hills down through the western counties; the centre is crossed by the Connecticut Valley, which has great fertility and beautiful scenery, while in the easternsection the Quinnebaug River makes a deep valley, and, flowing into the Thames, seeks the Sound at New London. These many hills make many streams, all having water-powers, around which cluster numerous busy factories.
The southwestern town of Connecticut is Greenwich, and in front Greenwich Point is thrust out into the Sound, while, as the Yankee land is entered by railway, on a high hill stands the Puritan outpost, seen from afar—a stately graystone Congregational Church with its tall spire. The ancient Greenwich village was built on the hillside at Horse Neck, and it was here, in 1779, that General Putnam swiftly galloped down the rude rocky stairway leading from the old church, to get away from the British dragoons, on what has since been known as "Old Put's Hill," and they were too much astonished either to chase or shoot him. Beyond is Stamford, a busy factory town, where lived in the eighteenth century Colonel Abraham Davenport, described as "a man of stern integrity and generous benevolence." He was a legislator, and when, on May 19, 1780, the memorable "Dark Day" came in New England, some one, fearing it was the day of judgment, proposed that the House adjourn. Davenport opposed it, saying, "The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty; I wish therefore that candles may be brought." This scene has been immortalized byWhittier. The town of Norwalk is beyond, another nest of busy mills, spreading upward on the hill-slopes from the Sound. The original settlers bought from the Indians in 1640 a tract extending "one day's north walk" from the Sound, and hence the name. Fine oysters are gathered in the spacious bay, and the people make shoes and hats, locks and door-knobs. On the lowlands to the eastward the Pequot Indian nation, once ruling all this part of New England, the name meaning "the destroyers," was finally overpowered in 1637 by the Colonial troops in the Sasco Swamp, now a cultivated farm, with almost the only highly fertile land seen in the immediate region. Most of the Pequots were captured and sold as slaves in the West Indies. Beyond is tranquil Fairfield, embowered in trees and introduced by a rubber-factory, its green-bordered streets lined with cottages, and church-spires rising among the groves, while along the shore it has the finest beach on Long Island Sound.
BRIDGEPORT, OLD STRATFORD AND MILFORD.
Pequannock, the "dark river" of the Indians, flows out of the hills to an inlet of the Sound, where the enormous mills of the active city of Bridgeport have gathered a population of over fifty thousand people, in a hive containing some of the world's greatest establishments for constructing sewing-machines and firearms, building carriages, and makingcutlery, corsets and soaps, while other goods also occupy attention. The grand Seaside Park esplanade overlooks the harbor, and towards the north the city stretches up the slopes into Golden Hill, named from its glittering mica deposits, where magnificent streets display splendid buildings. When the Pequots were exterminated in 1637, colonists founded this town, gradually crowding the Paugusset Indians, who owned the land, into a small reservation on Golden Hill. The great establishments to-day are the Wheeler and Wilson and Howe Sewing-Machine Works, Sharp's Rifle Factory and the Union Metallic Cartridge Company; and Bridgeport is also the headquarters of the chief American circus. The stately and high-towered mansion of Waldemere fronts the park, and was the home of Bridgeport's best-known townsman, the veteran showman, Phineas T. Barnum. Born in Connecticut, at Bethel, in 1810, he died at Bridgeport in 1891. He first developed the financial advantages of amusing the public, and possibly humbugging them on a grand scale, and by working upon his oft-quoted theory that "the people liked to be humbugged," twice amassed a large fortune. In early life he wandered over the country earning a precarious livelihood in various occupations, and in Philadelphia in 1834 began his career as a showman. He bought for $1000 a colored slave-woman, Joyce Heth, represented to be the nurse of George Washington and one hundredand sixty-one years old. From her exhibition his receipts reached $1500 a week, and she died the next year. In 1842 he began exhibiting Charles S. Stratton, "General Tom Thumb," a native of Bridgeport, born in 1832, whose size and growth were as usual until his seventh month, when he had a stature of twenty-eight inches, and ceased to grow. Barnum exhibited him in the United States, France and England, and attracted world-wide notoriety. Barnum started the American fashion of paying extravagant sums to opera-singers, in 1849 engaging Jenny Lind to sing at one hundred and fifty concerts in America for $1000 a night, the gross receipts of a nine months' tour being $712,000. He subsequently had his fortune swept away through endorsing $1,000,000 notes for a manufacturing establishment that went down in the panic of 1857. His fortunes were revived, however; he had museums in the leading cities, and in his later life had the "Greatest Show on Earth," which set out every spring from Bridgeport. Tom Thumb in 1863 married Lavinia Warren of Middleboro', Massachusetts, a dwarf like himself, and he died in 1882.
To the eastward a short distance, and in sharp contrast with active Bridgeport, is quiet old Stratford, with Stratford Point protruding in front into the Sound, at the entrance of the stately and placid Housatonic, which comes down through the meadowland just beyond the village. Here there are neitherwatering-place hotel nor busy factory to disturb the ancient order of things, encumber the greensward, or encroach upon the sleepy and comfortable houses, where one may dream away in the twilight, under the shade of grand trees that are even older than the town. Stratford is much the same now as when settled by a Puritan colony from Massachusetts in 1639, the leader and pastor being Adam Blackman, whom Cotton Mather called "a Nazarite purer than snow and whiter than milk." Across the patches of marshland, adjoining the Housatonic, is Milford, its half-mile-long stretch of village green neatly enclosed, and its houses upon the bank of the silvery Wap-o-wang, back of which spread the wide streets lined by rows of overarching elms. A colony from Milford in England settled here in 1639 and soon crowded the Indians off the land, establishing the primitive church, which was the usual beginning of New England settlements. Then, true to the American instinct, they proceeded to hold a convention, the result being the adoption of the following platform:
Voted, That the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof.
Voted, That the earth is given to the saints.
Voted, That we are the saints.
They had a good deal of trouble afterwards, both with the Dutch from New York and the Indians, but the saints ultimately possessed the earth in peace,and their successors are now making straw hats for the country.
THE CITY OF ELMS.
The city of New Haven, the most populous in Connecticut, having a hundred thousand people, is built upon a plain, surrounded by hills, at the head of a deep bay extending several miles northward from Long Island Sound. The magnificent elms, arching over the streets and the Public Green, and grandly rising in stately rows, make the earliest and the deepest impression upon the visitor. In one of his most eloquent passages, Henry Ward Beecher said that the elms of New England are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture. The grand foliage-arched avenues of New Haven are unsurpassed elsewhere, so that they are the crowning glory as well as the constant care of the townsfolk. Among the finest is the avenue separating the Yale College grounds from the Public Green—a magnificent Gothic aisle of the richest foliage-covered interlacing boughs. The Indian name for the region round about New Haven was Quinnepiack, and the placid Quinnepiack River, coming from the northward, flows through a deep valley past the towering East Rock into the harbor. Old John Davenport was the leader and first pastor of the infant colony that settled here. He was a powerful Anglican parish pastor of London who had joined the Puritans, and in 1637was forced to leave for New England with many of his people. They spent a year in Boston, but in April, 1638, sailed around Cape Cod to the Sound, and landed at Quinnepiack, where they laid out a town plan with nine squares for buildings, surrounding a large central square, the Public Green. At the foundation, Davenport delivered a most impressive sermon from the text, "Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars;" and from this came the original scheme of government for the colony by the seven leading church members, who were known as the "seven pillars." The colony got on well with the Indians, who revered Davenport, calling him "so big study man." They bought the whole tract of one hundred and thirty square miles from the Indians for thirteen coats. At first, however, they did not prosper, their trading ventures proving unfortunate, and they determined to abandon the place and remove elsewhere, selecting Jamaica, and afterwards Galloway in Ireland. The ship carrying their prospectors to Ireland sailed in January, 1647, but was never heard from afterwards, save when, as the legend has it, "the spectre of the ship sailed into the harbor in the teeth of a head-wind, and when in full view of the anxious people, it slowly melted into thin air and vanished." Then they decided to remain, and getting on better, in 1665 united their plantation with that of Connecticut at Hartford, under the condition that eachshould be a capital, a compact observed until 1874, when Hartford was made the sole capital. The British in July, 1779, attacked and partly burnt and plundered the town, the Americans galling them by desultory attacks as they passed through the streets. They captured Rev. Naphtali Daggett, President of Yale College, musket in hand, and with repeated bayonet-thrusts forced him to guide them. When he was wearied and sore from wounds they asked, "Will you fight again?" He sturdily answered, "I rather believe I shall if I have an opportunity." Being forced to pray for the King, he did it thus: "O Lord, bless thy servant King George, and grant him wisdom, for thou knowest, O Lord, he needs it."
The great fame of New Haven comes from Yale College, having two hundred and fifty instructors and over twenty-five hundred students, the orthodox Congregational University of New England, which for two centuries has exerted a most advantageous and widely diffused influence upon the American intellectual character, and around it and its multitude of buildings of every kind clusters the town. In the year 1700 ten clergymen planned to have a college in the colony of Connecticut, and for the purpose contributed as many books as they could spare for its library. In 1701 it was chartered, and began in a very small way at Saybrook, at the mouth of Connecticut River, during the first year having only onestudent. The pastor of the adjacent village of Killingworth was placed in charge, and for several years the students went there to him, though the commencements were held at Saybrook, and in 1707 the college was located at Saybrook. Subsequently, for a more convenient location, it was removed to New Haven, the first commencement being held there in 1718, and its first building being named Yale College, in honor of Elihu Yale, a native of the town, born in 1648, who went abroad, and afterwards became Governor of the East India Company. He made at different times gifts of books and money amounting to about five hundred pounds sterling, the benefactions being of greater value because of their timeliness. His name was afterwards adopted in the incorporation of the university. Timothy Dwight and Theodore D. Woolsey were perhaps the greatest Presidents of Yale, and among its graduates were Jonathan Edwards, Eli Whitney, Samuel F. B. Morse, Benjamin Silliman, Noah Webster, John C. Calhoun, J. Fenimore Cooper, James Kent, William M. Evarts, John Pierpont and Samuel J. Tilden. The College buildings are of various ages and styles of architecture, the original ones being the plain "Old Brick Row" on College Street, northwest of the Public Green, behind which what was formerly a large open space has been gradually covered with more modern structures. The line of ancient buildings facing the Green has a venerable and scholarlyaspect, stretching broadly across the greensward, fronted by noble elms arranged in quadruple lines along the street. One of these houses, Connecticut Hall, was built with money raised by a lottery, and from the proceeds of a French prize-ship in the colonial wars, when Connecticut aided the King by equipping a frigate. There are on the campus statues of the first rector, Abraham Pierson, President Woolsey and Professor Silliman. Various elaborate buildings are also upon adjacent grounds, such as the Peabody Museum, the Sheffield Scientific School, of four halls; the Divinity Halls, Observatory, Laboratory and Gymnasium, while the entrance to the campus from the Public Green is by an imposing tower-gateway known as Phelps Hall. The Peabody Museum has one of the best natural-history collections in the country, and the College Library approximates three hundred thousand volumes. Besides the Academic Department, Yale has schools of Science, Law, Medicine, Theology and the Fine Arts, and its properties and endowments exceed $10,000,000, the grounds occupying nine acres.
NEW HAVEN ATTRACTIONS.
But New Haven is much more than Yale College. It is a great hive of industry, manufacturing all kinds of "Yankee notions," with agricultural machinery, corsets, scales, organs, pianos, carriages, hardware and other things, and it has a large commercealong the coast and with the West Indies. It was to New Haven that the first steamboat navigating Long Island Sound went from New York in March, 1815, the Fulton, which occupied eleven hours in going there, and fifteen hours in returning two days later, being delayed by fog, subsequently, however, making the trip in less time. This boat was constructed by Robert Fulton, and carried a figure-head of him on her bow. She was one hundred and thirty-four feet long, and of three hundred and twenty-seven tons, built with a keel like a ship, having a sloop bow, and being rigged with one mast and sails to accelerate her speed. She was managed by Elihu S. Bunker, and her ability to pass through Hell Gate against a tide running six miles an hour was regarded as one of the marvels of that time. The New YorkEvening Postof March 25, 1815, describing her, said, "We have been assured that this establishment has cost $90,000, and we believe it may with truth be affirmed that there is not in the whole world such accommodations afloat as the Fulton affords. Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive that anything of the kind can exceed her in elegance and convenience." Many were the races she had with the "packet-sloops" that plied on the Sound and often beat her, when the wind was fair.
There are tastefully adorned suburbs surrounding New Haven, where the hills afford charming prospects. The two great attractions, however, are thebold and impressive promontories known as the East and West Rocks, which are high buttresses of trap rock, lifting themselves from the plain on each side of the town in magnificent opposition, and rising four hundred feet. The geologists say they were driven up through the other strata, and some people 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 tremendous cliff is the termination of a long mountain range coming down from the far North. The Green Mountain prolongation, stretching through ridges southward from Vermont, is represented in the West Rock, while the East Rock terminates the Mount Tom range, through which the Connecticut River breaks its passage in Massachusetts, and part of which rises a thousand feet in the "Blue Hills of Southington," which are the most elevated portion of Connecticut. Thus projected out upon the plain, almost to Long Island Sound, the summits of these two huge rocks afford grand views. In the Judge's Cave, a small cleft in a group of boulders on the West Rock, the three regicides, Goffe, Whalley and Dixwell were in hiding for some time in 1661, and the three streets leading out to this rock from the city are named after them. It is recorded that a man living about a mile away took them food until one night a catamount looked in on them, and "blazed his eyes in such a frightful manner asgreatly to terrify 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 that was the graveyard of colonial New Haven, and Whalley is buried nearby.
There is a grand approach to the East Rock, which is elevated high above the marshy valley of Mill River, winding about its base, and upon the topmost crag is a noble monument reared to the soldiers who fell in the Civil War. The whole surface of the East Rock is a park, and upon the face of the cliff the perpendicular strata of reddish-brown trap stand bolt upright. From this elevated outpost there is a charming view over the town spreading upon the flat plain, and the little harbor stretching down to the Sound; and beyond, across the silvery waters, can be traced the hazy hills of Long Island, twenty-five miles away. Two little crooked rivers come out of the deep valleys on either side of the great rock, winding through the town to the harbor, while all about, the country is dotted with flourishing villages. Among them is Wallingford, to which the railway leads northeast amid meadows and brickyards until it reaches the high hill, whose church-towers watch over the population, largely composed of plated-ware makers. When this town was founded, John Davenport came out from New Haven and preached the initial sermon from the appropriate text, "My beloved hath a vineyard on a very fruitful hill."
Hillhouse Avenue, a broad and beautiful elm-shaded street bordered by fine mansions, leads out to the "Sachem's Wood," which was the home of the Hillhouses, of whom James Hillhouse was the great Connecticut Senator after the Revolution. His remains repose in the old Grove Street Burying-Ground, where rest many other famous men of the Academic City, among them Timothy Dwight, Lyman Beecher, Samuel F. B. Morse, Benjamin Silliman, Elbridge Gerry, Roger Sherman, of whom Jefferson wrote that he "never said a foolish thing in his life," Eli Whitney, and Noah Webster, who, before he compiled his famous dictionary, had published the "Elementary Spelling Book," which had a sale of fifty millions of copies. The New Haven City Hall, fronting the Green, is one of the finest municipal buildings in New England. The three churches occupying the centre of the Green are the North, the Centre, and Trinity churches, the first two Congregationalist and the last Episcopal, the row presenting a curiously quaint and ancient appearance. The favorite resort of the people of New Haven is Savin Rock, a promontory four miles away, pushing a rocky front to the Sound at the end of a long sandy beach, and having a good view, being located westward from the harbor entrance.
OLD SAYBROOK.
The Connecticut River flows into Long Island Sound thirty-three miles east of New Haven at SaybrookPoint. Between is the venerable village of Guilford, where Fitz Greene Halleck was born, and where the three regicides were also for some time hidden. Out in front is the bold and picturesque Sachem's Head, which got its name from a tragedy of the Pequot War in 1637. The Mohican chief Uncas pursued a Pequot warrior out on this point, and shooting him, put his head in the fork of an oak tree, where it remained many years. The group of Thimble Islands are off shore, having been repeatedly dug over by deluded individuals searching for the buried treasures of Captain Kidd. Saybrook Point was the place of earliest settlement in Connecticut. The first English patent for lands on these coasts was granted to Lord Saye and Seal and Lord Brooke, and the colony was given their double name. The original settlement was planned with great care, as it was expected to become the home of noted men, and a fort was built on an isolated hill at the river's mouth. According to the British historian, it was to Saybrook that Cromwell, Pym, Hampden and Haselrig, with their party of malcontents, intended to emigrate when they were stopped by the order of King Charles I. Had this migration been made, it might have greatly changed the subsequent momentous events in England ending with the execution of that king. A little westward of the old colonial fort guarding the river entrance, a public square was laid out, where, according to the town plan, their houseswere to have been built. The first Yale College at Saybrook was a narrow one-story house eighty feet long, and looking much like a ropewalk, which was afterwards removed, with the college, to New Haven. Its founders were pious men, who in 1708 drew up the celebrated "Saybrook Platform," with a declaration that "the churches must have a public profession of faith, agreeable to which the instruction of the college shall be conducted."
The ancient fort at Saybrook, built by Plymouth people in 1635, stood upon a steep and solitary knoll near the Connecticut River, which in 1872 was carried off bodily by a railroad to make embankments across the adjacent lowlands. The earliest governor of the colony came out in 1636, Colonel Fenwick, afterwards one of the regicide judges. Old Saybrook is now a quiet village, chiefly spread along one handsome wide street, canopied over by the arching branches of its stately elms, under which the distant vista view looks almost like a scene through a veritable foliage tunnel. The broad Connecticut flows in front, back and forth with the tide from the Sound, its restfulness in keeping with the ancient town, as yet uninvaded by business bustle or manufacturing energy. The Saybrook fort repelled the Pequots in 1637; and afterwards, in the Connecticut boundary disputes with the Dutch at New York, the latter, according to the veracious chronicler, marched against it "brimful of wrath and cabbage," but seeing itwould be stoutly defended, he adds that "they thought best to desist before attacking." The British captured it in 1814, and ascending the river in a sudden raid, destroyed a large number of vessels.
THE THAMES TO THE PAWCATUCK.
The river Thames, coming down out of the hills and receiving the Quinnebaug, flows into the Sound twenty miles east of the Connecticut, and here is the pleasant city of New London, with about fifteen thousand people. Thus the early settlers renewed in the New England colony the names of old London and Father Thames, replacing the original Indian titles of Pequot for the town and Mohegan for the river. New London is built on a hillside, famous for comfortable old mansions and noble trees on the hilly streets, running down the declivity to the harbor, in the upper part of which is a navy yard. On either side of the harbor entrance are the gray walls and grassy mounds of the ancient defensive works, Forts Griswold and Trumbull, which got their chief scars during the Revolution. The most sacred New London memory is of Nathan Hale, who lived there, his little house being preserved as a relic. The Thames is a fine estuary, and upon it are sailed the great Yale and Harvard boat-races. New London was the headquarters of the Connecticut navy during the Revolution, a fleet of twenty-six vessels. After Arnold's treason, he came in September, 1780, withships and a large force of troops, captured Fort Trumbull and burnt the town. Afterwards they attacked Fort Griswold across the river, losing large numbers in storming it, and when the garrison had surrendered they were massacred. A fine granite Obelisk contains the names of the slain, and bears the inscription: "Zebulon and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives till death in the high places of the Lord." The people of New London go down to the Sound for recreation and clam-bakes, the wide-spreading beaches having numerous hotels and summer cottages. All this region in the early times was the home of the Niantic Indians, a clan of the Narragansetts, their sachem being Ninigret, the brother of Canonicus and uncle of Miantonomoh, whose names are preserved in powerful American warships.
Beyond the Thames is Groton, known as the home of Silas Deane, the early American diplomatist, a hilly township, with little good soil. On its verge are Fort Hill, where Sassacus, the sachem of the Pequots, had his royal fortress, and Mystic, with the popular resort of Mystic Island just off shore. To the northward of Mystic is Pequot Hill, where Colonel Mason attacked that tribe in May, 1637. He had marched out of Rhode Island with ninety English and over four hundred Mohicans and Narragansetts under the sachems Uncas and Miantonomoh, but when they arrived at the Pequot stronghold, the Indianallies were afraid to attack and drew off. Nothing daunted, Mason and his colonial soldiers prepared to do the work alone, and as a preliminary knelt down in prayer. At the sight of this, another sachem, Wequash, who had been their guide, was amazed and asked an explanation, and when he understood it, became so impressed that he was converted, afterwards preaching throughout New England. Mason and his men assaulted the stronghold in the darkness, and got inside the palisades, but being overwhelmed by the superior numbers, fell back after setting fire to the wigwams. The fire compelled the Pequots to flee, and then the English and friendly Indians surrounded the hill and shot down the fugitives, there being six hundred Pequots shot or burnt, this being the death-blow to the tribe. Old Cotton Mather, who recorded it, wrote: "It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God." Sassacus, from Fort Hill, sent reinforcements, but they were too late, although they harassed Mason's retreat, and Sassacus was soon forced also to flee, the remnant of the Pequot tribe being killed or captured in Sasco Swamp.
This region was Pawcatuck, and its chief town now is Stonington, built on a fine harbor, near the Rhode Island boundary, which is protected by theprotruding arm of Watch Hill Point, the whole coast thereabout being filled with summer hotels and cottages. Stonington is on a narrow rocky peninsula, and of this town, in the early part of the nineteenth century, President Dwight of Yale College wrote, referring to its reputation, that "Stonington and all its vicinity suffers in religion from the nearness of Rhode Island." The place was bombarded for three days, in 1814, by a British fleet, but all attempts to land were successfully repulsed. Watch Hill Point is a high bold promontory, with sand beaches stretching both ways and hooking around westward so as to enclose Stonington harbor. To the eastward is Westerly on the Pawcatuck River, noted for its fine granite quarries and textile factories.
EASTERN LONG ISLAND.
From the Long Island shore, opposite the mouth of Connecticut River, there protrudes northeastward an elongated and almost bisected peninsula, ending in Orient Point. The eastern end of Long Island divides into two arms, this being the northern one, having at its outer extremity Plum Island, the passage between being the famous "Plum Gut," a short cut occasionally taken by cunning yachtsmen racing around Long Island. Orient Point was originally the "Oyster Pond Point," its name having been modernized, and Plum Island, covering more than a square mile, is said to have been bought from the Indians bythe first colonists in 1667 for a hundred fish-hooks and a barrel of biscuit. A succession of islands stretches out from it over northeastward towards the Rhode Island shore, and these guard the entrance to the Sound. The southern arm of Long Island extends much farther eastward than the northern one, and ends in Montauk Point. Enclosed between these branching peninsulas is Shelter Island, thus appropriately named from its well protected harbors. It is a delicious island, about four by six miles in extent, picturesque and irregular in outline, having cliffs and promontories dropping off into tiny coves and bays with little beaches, their shores rich with the attractions that shells and sea mosses give. In the interior are rolling hills and fresh-water ponds. Out in front on either hand are the blue waters of Peconic and Gardiner's Bays, with the broad Atlantic beyond. This island was the home of the Manhasset Indians, and that was its early name. To its hospitable shores fled some of the persecuted Quakers of New England, when driven out by the Puritans, the settlement being made as early as 1652. The records tell that in the eighteenth century George Whitefield came and preached here with such fervor and success that he was constrained to ask, "And is Shelter Island become a Patmos?" It is in a delightful location, and from the breezy hill-tops which have a grand outlook over the azure waters there can be seen a vision