Chapter III: Part 3

A border of tombs almost surrounds Brooklyn, for in the suburbs are the great cemeteries which are the burial-places of both cities. In lovely situations upon the surrounding hills are Greenwood, Cypress Hills, Evergreen, Holy Cross, Calvary, Mount Olivet, The Citizens' Union, Washington and other cemeteries, occupying many hundreds of acres. Of these, the noted Greenwood is the chief, covering some four hundred acres on Gowanus Heights, south of the city. This is a high ridge dividing Brooklyn from the lowlands on the south side of Long Island, and it has elevations giving charming views. The route to it crosses various railroads leading to Coney Island, which is the ultimate objective point of most Brooklyn lines of transit. A neat lawn-bordered road leads up to the magnificent cemetery entrance on Fifth Avenue, an elaborate and much ornamental brownstone structure rising into a central pinnacle over a hundred feet high. This entrance covers two fine gateways, with representations of Gospel scenes, the principal being the Raising of Lazarus and the Resurrection. The grounds display great beauty, the ridgy, rounded hills spreading in all directions, the surface being an alternation of hills and vales, vaults terracing the hillsides, with elaborate mausoleums above and frequent little lakes nestling in the pleasant valleys. Vast sums have been expended on some of the grander tombs, which are upon a scale of great magnificence. The attractive rural names of the walks and avenues, the delicious flowers and foliage, the balmy air, the lakes, valleys and points of beautiful outlook giving grand views over New York Bay and the surrounding country, make Greenwood a park as well as a cemetery, and it is generally admitted to be without a peer. Many costly pantheons and chapels cover the remains of well-known people, and one mausoleum is a large marble church. A three-sided monument of peculiar construction standing on a knoll marks the resting-place of Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegrapher. Horace Greeley's tomb has his bust in bronze on a pedestal. A colossal statue surmounts the grave of the great De Witt Clinton, the Governor of New York who built the Erie Canal and thus secured the commercial supremacy of the city. The romantic career of Lola Montez ended in Greenwood. Commodore Garrison, who was at one time Vanderbilt's rival in steamship management, is interred in a mosque. The tomb of the Steinways is a large granite building. A magnificent marble canopy crowns the Scribner tomb, having beneath it an angel of mercy. There is an appropriate monument to Roger Williams. Here are also buried Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing-machine, Peter Cooper, Henry Ward Beecher, James Gordon Bennett, Henry George and others of fame. The Firemen, the Pilots and the New York Volunteers all have grand monuments, the statue sentinels of the latter overlooking the bay. Among these magnificent sepulchres, probably the most magnificent is that of Charlotte Canda, an heiress, who died in early youth, her fortune being expended upon her tomb.

There is a high lookout upon the eastern border of this attractive place, where the flat land at the base of the ridge spreads for miles away to the sea. The Coney Island hotels, by the ocean side, are dim in the distance, and far over the water the Navesink Highlands close the view beyond Sandy Hook. The many railroads leading to Coney Island can be traced out, as on a map, across the level land. Over on the western side of the cemetery is another lookout, having a broad view of Brooklyn and the harbor, extending to the hills of Staten Island and the distant Jersey lowlands beyond. This is the verge of Gowanus Heights, with the busy commerce of the port spread at its base. It is this magnificent scene which the marble sentinels overlook who are guarding the Volunteers' Monument erected by the city of New York.

Between Greenwood Cemetery and Prospect Park there are various railways, all going to Coney Island, and also the Ocean Parkway, leading thither, a splendid boulevard, two hundred feet wide, and planted with six rows of trees, being flanked on either side by a broad cycle-path. It is laid in a straight line from the southwestern corner of the Park for three miles to the great seaside resort. Prospect Park covers nearly a square mile on an elevated ridge on the edge of Brooklyn, and it has great natural attractions which did not need much change to improve the landscape, while the fine old trees that have been there for centuries are in magnificent maturity. Its woods and meadows, winding roads, lakes and views, combine many charms. On Lookout Hill, rising two hundred feet, the most commanding point, with a view almost entirely around the compass, there is a monument on the slope in memory of the Maryland troops who fell in the Revolutionary battle of Long Island, fought in August, 1776, on these heights. The Park is ornamented with several statues, including one of Abraham Lincoln, and there is a bust of John Howard Payne, the author of _Home, Sweet Home_. It has an extensive lake, a deer preserve, children's playgrounds, and a concert grove and promenade. The main entrance is a fine elliptical plaza with a splendid fountain, and adorned by a Memorial Arch to the Soldiers and Sailors of the Civil War, and a statue of James Stranahan, a venerable citizen of Brooklyn, foremost in all its good works, who died in 1898. The Brooklyn Institute, an academy of art and science with a large membership, has a large building in the Park.

CONEY ISLAND.

Pretty much all routes through Brooklyn, as already indicated, lead to Coney Island, the barren strip of white sand, clinging to the southern edge of Long Island, about ten miles from New York, which is the objective point of the populace when in sweltering summer weather they crave a breath of sea air. The antiquarians of the island insist that it was the earliest portion of these adjacent coasts discovered, and tell how Verrazani came along about 1529 and found this sand-strip, and how Hudson, nearly a century later, held conferences with the Indians on the island. But however that may be, its wonderful development as a summer resort has only come since the Civil War. It has a hard and gently-sloping beach facing the Atlantic, and can be so easily and cheaply reached, by so many routes on land and water, that it is no wonder, on hot afternoons and holidays, the people of New York and Brooklyn go down there by the hundreds of thousands. Coney Island is about five miles long, and from a quarter-mile to a mile in width, being separated from the adjacent low-lying mainland only by a little crooked creek and some lagoons. It has two bays deeply indented behind it, Gravesend Bay on the west and Sheepshead Bay on the east. The name is derived from Cooney Island, meaning the "Rabbit Island," rabbits having been the chief inhabitants in earlier days. The Coney Island season of about a hundred days, from June until September, is an almost uninterrupted festival, and nothing can exceed the jollity on these beaches, when a hot summer sun drives the people down to the shore to seek relief and have a good time. They spread over the miles of sand-strip, with scores of bands of music of varying merit in full blast, minstrel shows, miniature theatres, Punch and Judy, merry-go-rounds and carrousels, big snakes, fat women, giant, dwarf, midget and pugilistic exhibitions, shooting-galleries, concerts, circuses, fortune-tellers, swings, toboggan slides, scenic railways, and myriads of other attractions; lakes of beer on tap, with ample liquids of greater strength; and everywhere a good-humoured crowd, sight-seeing and enjoying themselves, eating, drinking, and very numerously consuming the great Coney Island delicacy, "clam-chowder." To the clam, which is universal and popular, the visitors pay special tribute. This famous bivalve is the _Mya Arenaria_ of the New England coast, said to have been for years the chief food of the Pilgrim fathers. Being found in abundance in all the neighboring waters, it is served in every style, according to taste. As the Coney Island "Song of the Clam" has it:

"Who better than I? in chowder or pie,
Baked, roasted, raw or fried?
I hold the key to society,
And am always welcome inside."

The long and narrow Coney Island sand-strip may be divided into four distinctive sections--a succession of villages chiefly composed of restaurants, lodging-houses and hotels, built along the edge of the beach, and usually on a single road behind it. In the past generation the rougher classes best knew its western end or Norton's Point, a resort of long standing. The middle of the island is a locality of higher grade--West Brighton Beach. Here great iron piers project into the ocean, being availed of for steamboat landings, restaurants and amusement places, while beneath are bathing establishments. Electricity and fireworks are used extensively to add to the attractions, and there is also a tall Observatory. The broad Ocean Parkway, coming down from Prospect Park and Brooklyn, terminates at West Brighton Beach. East of this is a partially vacant, semi-marshy space, beyond which is Brighton Beach, there being a roadway and elevated railroad connecting them. Brighton is the third section, and about a half-mile farther east is the fourth and most exclusive section--Manhattan Beach. Here are the more elaborate and costly Coney Island hotels. In all this district the power of the ocean is shown in the effect of great storms, which wash away roads, railways and buildings, and shift enormous amounts of the sands from one locality, piling them up in front of another. Huge hotels have had to be moved, in some cases bodily, a thousand feet back inland from the ocean front, to save them, and immense bulkheads constructed for protection; but sometimes the waves play havoc with these. Very much of the money spent by the visitors has to be devoted to saving the place and preventing the wreck of the great buildings. But this does not worry the visitors so much as it does the landlords. On a hot day the vast crowds arriving on the trains are poured into the hotels, and swarm out upon the grounds fronting them, where the bands play. Here the orchestras give concerts to enormous audiences. The piazzas are filled with supper-parties, the music amphitheatres are crowded, and thousands saunter over the lawns. As evening advances, the blaze of electric illumination and brilliancy of fireworks are added, and the music, bustling crowds and general hilarity give the air of a splendid festival. The bathing establishments are crowded, and many go into the surf under the brilliant illumination. Not a tree will grow, so that the view over the sea is unobstructed, and out in front is the pathway of ocean commerce into New York harbor, with the twinkling, guiding lights of Sandy Hook and its attendant lightships beyond. What a guardian to the mariner is the lighthouse:

"'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 walking about 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 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 ENVIRONMENT OF LONG ISLAND SOUND.

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 is enclosed 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 past Patchogue 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 of _Home, 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 River between 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 the deeply indented Hempstead Harbor, where lived at his home of Cedarmere, for many years, William Cullen Bryant, who now sleeps in the little cemetery.

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 Matinecock Indians 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 Byram River, 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 inventions of 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 eastern section 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 by Whittier. 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 making cutlery, 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 hundred and 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 neither watering-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 1637 was 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 each should 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 one student. 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 scholarly aspect, 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 commerce along 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 York _Evening Post_ of 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 the bold 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 as greatly 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 Saybrook Point. 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 houses were 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 it would 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.