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Catechisms are dropped for muskets, and Bibles fall unnoticed under foot, as men spring for their haversacks and powder-horns. For those three guns summon the minute men to be on the march for Bennington. All the afternoon before, the roar of cannon has faintly sounded from the northward, and the people knew that Stark was meeting Baum and his Hessians, on the Hoosac.

When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot The power of suction to resist, And claret-bottles harber not Such dimples as would hold your fist, When publishers no longer steal, And pay for what they stole before, When the first locomotive's wheel Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore;

I never before saw such a realm of exquisite flowers so exquisitely displayed, and the effect at every turn throughout the land was colour, colour, colour, to as far outdo the finest autumn tints of New England as the Colorado Canyon outdoes the Hoosac Gorge.

The fort was Fort Massachusetts, the most westerly of the three posts lately built to guard the frontier. "My Father," said the Abenaki spokesman to Rigaud, "it will be easy to take this fort, and make great havoc on the lands of the English. Seeing his Indians pleased with the proposal to march for the Hoosac, Rigaud gladly accepted it; on which whoops, yelps, and war-songs filled the air.

The first train pierced the Hoosac Tunnel, in Western Massachusetts, February 9, 1875, completing another artery between East and West. The tunnel passed through the Hoosac Mountain, a distance of four miles and three-quarters, and had been in process of boring, though not continuously, about fifteen years. The lighting of large spaces by electricity in a profitable manner may be dated from 1875.

Everywhere we detected signs of the historical, the traditional, the Yankee. The names of the stations rang in our ears like bells, Lexington, Concord, Cambridge, Charlestown, and at last Boston! What a strange, new world this ancient city was to us, as we issued from the old Hoosac Tunnel station! The intersection of every street was a bit of history.

The mere fastened-down stable things, the mere actual facts, stopped being the world with Columbus, and the air and the sky began to be swung in, and to be swept through the thoughts and acts of men and of women.... Then miners, mariners, explorers, inventors the impossible steamship, the railway, the impossible cotton-gin and sewing-machine and reaper, Hoosac tunnels and Atlantic cables.

Now who believes that it does not require more genius and skill to execute this minute work than it does to bore a Hoosac tunnel, or build a Victoria bridge, or put a dam across the Connecticut, or construct an Erie canal? I do not speak of the relative importance of the great works and the small, but of the relative amount and quality of the power that is brought to bear upon them.

Here is the Berkshire Athenæum, with its excellent public library, where we must stay long enough to glance through the town history, compiled by Mr. J.E.A. Smith. A century and a half ago an unbroken wilderness stretched between the Hoosac and Taconic ranges. The mountains rose by steady degrees from the hills of Connecticut to Mount Mansfield, in Vermont, 4,400 feet above the level of the sea.

When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot The power of suction to resist, And claret-bottles harbor not Such dimples as would hold your fist, When publishers no longer steal, And pay for what they stole before, When the first locomotive's wheel Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore;