Rev. Peter Starr arrested his attention little, but when from Litchfield, twelve miles to the east, the famous Lyman Beecher came on an exchange, the case was different, and he with older minds sat spell-bound under the enthusiastic fervor of that imaginative preacher. So much for the past of this place. Left off from the map of the railroads, it has yet played its part in the life of the world.

Illustrious men were all about upon these Litchfield Hills. Not only Beecher and in later years, his children, Harriet, Henry Ward, Charles, and Thomas, all born in Litchfield, a place where Henry Ward later said "it almost required medicinal help to get sick;" but in the former century, Joseph Bellamy the learned divine at Bethlehem, and Ethan Allen surer of his fame through Ticonderoga than through theology, and Tapping Reeve the founder of the law school, bringing with him on occasion Aaron Burr, the brother of his wife. This is good hunting ground for sons and daughters of the Revolution. But even here though the family thread does not "end in a loop of stronger twine," it is certainly "waxed at the other end by some plebian vocation."

Count Rochambeau and Lafayette paid visits to these hills, and at Litchfield Washington is said to have heard of Arnold's treason. As he goes on his way to West Point he passes a night twelve miles to the southwest, in the neighborhood of Waramaug. The house was that of Major William Cogswell, captain of a company under Washington at Long Island, and was built about 1760. It is now owned by Mr. Gould Whittlesey who, as sunny, capacious, and well preserved as the house, proves with certitude that Washington slept once within its walls. A few rods to the west of this house, disclosed to us as long prayers ought to be, in sections, lies the village. But unlike

the prayers every turn in its tortuous streets is a surprise. Here one may well ask "how the other nine-tenths live."

Hills, stream and boulders here maintain their rights against all assaults of man. Build if you choose a city house, around the corner you are in the country. You do not go to the other side of the street to call, there isn't any other side of the street. Directions are impossible. You keep going and then "turn down indirectly to the place." Step out from a home of culture and you are under the

spray of a small edition of Minnehaha Falls. Ox-teams are at the grist mill, flanking the store, where at metropolitan prices you may buy candy, cheese or a suit of clothes. While waiting for the mail you may fish for minnows. But this community has no apologies to offer. While the railroad even now stays respectfully five miles away, it has sent out costly contributions to the world. It is such places as these that have given New England its name on the earth. Where men live seems to tell us something of

what they are. These rural villages among the rocks and woods! Would that more boys could live in them; where in a testing of lungs against the breeze, and of

legs upon the steep roads, the sense of mastery might waken also in the mind!

Follow along this ridge less than two miles to the southwest and there was Nathaniel W. Taylor born, the leader in the New England Theology of this century. But why go from the village itself? Read what a native says of this his own town. It was in a speech delivered before the legislature of Connecticut, at the inauguration of the New Britain Normal School, June 4, 1851. "Let me," he says, "give you the picture of a little obscure parish in Litchfield County; and I hope you will pardon me if I do it, as I must, with a degree of personal satisfaction; for it is not any very bad vice in a son to be satisfied with his parentage. This little parish is made up of the corners of three towns, and the ragged ends and corners of twice as many mountains and stonysided hills. But this rough, wild region, bears a race of healthy-minded, healthybodied, industrious and religious people. They love to educate their sons and God gives them their reward. Out of this little, obscure nook among the mountains, have come forth two presidents of colleges, the two that a few years ago presided, at the

same time, over the two institutions, Yale and Washington (now Trinity). Besides these they have furnished a Secretary of State for the commonwealth, during a quarter of a century or more. Also a Solicitor, commonly known as the Cato of the United States Treasury. Also a member of Congress. Also a distinguished professor. And besides these a greater number of lawyers, physicians, preachers and teachers, both male and female, than I am now able to enumerate. Probably some of you have never so much as heard the name of this little by-place on the map of Connecticut; generally it is not on the maps at all; but how many cities are there of 20,000 inhabitants in our country, that have not exerted one-half the influence on mankind. The power of this little parish, it is not too much to say, is felt in every part of our great nation. Recognized, of course, it is not; but still it is felt."

Such is Horace Bushnell's tribute to those who trod these hills before him. Without enlarging upon their history and record; the Days, Whittleseys, Taylors, Goulds, among these to whom he refers, why not call to mind some memorials of

THE ABANDONED FARM HOUSE.

Dr. Bushnell himself? He was born here in 1802, and many are the people who remember him well in the days of his power. An old gentleman took me to the

fork of the road just out of the village and outlined the location of the school-house where Bushnell first attended.

It has been said that where the land in New England is too poor to raise corn they planted school-houses to raise men. It needs but one glance over the rough acres owned by Bushnell's father to make sure they were not favorable soil for corn. Horace had his trials with the rocks; you may now be shown by the present polite owner the heavy walls laid by Bushnell's hands when a lad. Horace's

of his preparation for the ministry. During his licentiate days he was admired at the home church as a preacher. He was, from the first, original and bold in his thinking, brilliant and vigorous in style. A man still living among the scenes of his youth told me what a profound impression was made on him by hearing Bushnell, several years his senior, preach. "He was not," to quote his words, "like anybody else; of medium height, rich, splendid voice, independent manner, putting fire and action into his sermons."

father was a clothier and owned a small mill on the stream which now furrows its same deep course through the town. The mill and the dam are still used and there is precept as well as history in the thought that Bushnell's hands, ere he was 18 years of age, helped to roll from their original useless hillside beds the massive stones, and to place them in the dam where they lie today for the profit of man. Bushnell was late in getting to college, graduating at Yale in 1827, where he was tutor 18291831, during which time occurred his remarkable conversion and the opening

In the old stone church on New Preston hill, Bushnell preached his first sermon, while his mother, as she told her neighbors, trembled for him. Toward the close of his seminary course, in this same church he was preaching, when home on a vacation. A thunder storm came up and in the midst of the sermon, which was on the judgments of heaven which might some day befall men, the building was struck by lightning. One who was present told me he vividly remembered the hour; how the girls in the gallery trembled, and then with the

prefer the schools of seventy years ago to those now found in most of our large cities. I do not believe it would have been better to have substituted for the rude and simple arrangement of the Connecticut district school of 1815, a little arithmetic, a little geography, a little diluted and simplified physical science and a little of almost everything else administered in the manner of modern times." He says he learned the "important lesson of obedience to properly constituted authority." He speaks of the

have done had the last five of those years been spent in a modern graded school with all the latest improvements."

How different is the testimony of Henry Ward Beecher. He writes in the Star Papers a school reminiscence and says, "It was our misfortune in boyhood to go to a district school," (This must refer to some school on Litchfield Hills for at the age of thirteen his father took the family to Boston.) I certainly we were never sent for any such absurd purpose as an education. We were read and spelled