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The first of these was the steamer Housatonic, sunk on February 3, 1917, near the Scilly Islands without loss of life. The sailing schooner Lyman M. Law was sent to the bottom of the sea on February 12, 1917, off the coast of Sardinia in the Mediterranean, also without loss of life. Next on the list was the steamer Algonquin, sunk on March 12, 1917, near the Scilly Islands without loss of life.

Long before the Revolution opened, there thus existed in New England a fringe of pioneer settlements such as Vassalboro and Durham on the Androscoggin and the Kennebec, Concord and Hinsdale on the Merrimac and the Connecticut, Pittsfield and Great Barrington on the Housatonic which formed a newer New England, less lettered and scriptural than the old, where class distinctions were little known, where contact with the Indian and the wilderness had added a secular ruthlessness and ingenuity to the harsh Puritan temper, and where the individual, freed from an effective "village moral police," learned in the rough school of nature a new kind of conformity unknown to the ancient Hebrew code.

The first beams of the sun of August 17, 1777, were glancing down the long valley, which opening to the East, lets in the early rays of morning, upon the village of Stockbridge. Then, as now, the Housatonic crept still and darkling around the beetling base of Fisher's Nest, and in the meadows laughed above its pebbly shoals, embracing the verdant fields with many a loving curve.

"But we have had some pretty tight weather since, if you remember," said the doctor; "and the boats have ceased to connect with the stage. We shall have to go to Greenfield to take the Housatonic, which will land us at Bridgeport on the Sound." "Have we time to reach Greenfield this morning?"

"Andy and me used to go fishin' acrosst that bridge. Did you ever see the Housatonic River? I've fished a lot there. Cornwall, Connecticut. The hills are pretty there. Then Andy got worse. You look in that drawer." John remembered, and when he got out the tintype, Jake stretched for it eagerly.

A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make it brighter, sweet as a summer's day beside the Housatonic. The world loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his wonderful eyes, and the children hovered and fluttered about him.

ABOUT a mile from one of the Berkshire villages, and separated from it by the Housatonic, is one of the loveliest sites in all our old county. It is on an exhausted farm of rocky, irregular, grazing ground, with a meadow of rich alluvial soil.

On the outbreak of the French and Indian War a young officer named Montalbert was despatched to the Berkshire country to persuade the Housatonic Indians to declare hostility to the English, and it was as a guest in the village of Onota that he heard of the white deer.

At other times he would take an offending club firmly in his big hands and break it into four pieces, which he would drive into the ground, hurling the head itself, with a last diabolical gesture, into the Housatonic River, which, as may be repeated, wriggles its way through the course as though convulsed with merriment.

Each time as they arrive nervously at the first tee and prepare to swing, something between a chuckle and a grin runs through the assemblage, while the left eyes contract waggishly, and a murmuring may be heard, "Even threes." The Stockbridge golf-links is a course of ravishing beauty and the Housatonic River, as has been said, goes wriggling around it as though convulsed with merriment.