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It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghanic to the sea.

Six miles away from Aunt Jed's, on the top of a hill overlooking the Housatonic Valley, stood the Leighton homestead, a fine old-fashioned house, now unoccupied save for a care-taking farmer and his wife, who farmed the Leighton acres on shares. The homestead belonged to Lewis's father, and in the natural course of events was destined to become Lewis's property.

Between Yreka and the Klamath River a narrow, rapid stream, recalling some portions of the Housatonic, which we intersected about noon, and along which we rode for an hour we met only two or three silent horsemen and as many eremitic wood-choppers.

She had led to the camp a white man, who had been wandering beside the Housatonic, ill and weak, vainly seeking a way out of the wilderness, and, in spite of the dark looks that were cast at him and her, she succeeded in making him, for that summer, a member of the tribe. As the man grew strong with her care he grew happy and he fell in love.

The gurgle of that cloistered brooklet was already in Pem's heart as her dilating gaze spanned the Housatonic, broad and open, "warbling" amid its soft meadow slopes, as she had looked upon it from the Devil's Chair. "But, goody! I hope we won't run across him there Jack at a Pinch! Flaunting round like a grosbeak!" She bit the thought into an olive.

Block sailed along the low wooded shores of Connecticut, past the mouth of the Housatonic, which he named the "River of the Red Mountain," and reported it to be "about a bowshot wide," and by and by he came to a much larger stream emptying into the Sound. This was the Connecticut, and Block turned and sailed up the river as far as the point where Hartford now stands.

At this period, when politics were carried into private affairs, as religion had been some hundred years before, each party must have its factory. Thus the Housatonic Woolen Mill of 1810 was offset a few years later by the Pittsfield Woolen and Cotton Company in Federalist hands. The former enterprise languished before long for want of sufficient water power.

There were ten of the beautiful bonds of the Great Lakes and Canadian Southern Railroad Company with their miniature locomotives and fields of wheat, and ten equally lovely bits of engraving belonging to the long-since defunct Bluff Creek and Iowa Central, ten more superb lithographs issued by the Mohawk and Housatonic in 1867 and paid off in 1882, and a variety of gorgeous chromos of Indians and buffaloes, and of factories and steamships spouting clouds of soft-coal smoke; and on the top of all was a pile of the First Mortgage Gold Six Per Cent obligations of the Chicago Water Front and Terminal Company all of them fresh and crisp, with that faintly acrid smell which though not agreeable to the nostrils nevertheless delights the banker's soul.

February 3 President Wilson reviews submarine controversy before congress; United States severs diplomatic relations with Germany; American steamer Housatonic sunk without warning. Feb. 7 Senate indorses President's act of breaking off diplomatic relations. Feb. 12 United States refuses German request to discuss matters of difference unless Germany withdraws unrestricted submarine warfare order.

The C. S. S. Hunley was a real submarine, and went down readily, but on five occasions it failed to emerge properly, and drowned in these experiments about 35 men. In August, 1864, running on the surface, it sank by torpedo the U. S. Corvette Housatonic off Charleston, but went down in the suction of the larger vessel, carrying to death its last heroic crew.