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Running out from her bow was a stout spar fifteen feet long, bearing at its end a huge torpedo charged with two hundred pounds of powder. Just before nine o'clock one night, the lookout on the deck of the frigate "Housatonic" saw this strange object approaching the ship. It was a bright night, with no sea on.
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.
But Providence seems to have had other and higher designs, and evidently guided her course to the indulgence of these blissful fancies. In a short time they had purchased and settled upon a rich farm, of moderate size, upon the Housatonic River, in Lenox, near Pittsfield, Mass. Precious, indeed, were now her privileges. The word was ably preached and was a feast to her soul.
The highest point being Tip-Top, 1,310 feet, and the lowest point 620 feet. The Hill is characterized by its immediate and abrupt rise above surrounding localities, being from 500 to 830 feet above the village of Pawling, in which the waters divide for the Hudson and Housatonic Rivers. On its highest hill rises the brook which becomes the Croton River.
The next step was the successful attack by the Confederate "fish-torpedo boat" David, on the Union ironclad Housatonic in Charleston harbor on February 17, 1864; and the next was the sinking of the Confederate ironclad Albemarle by a spar torpedo carried on a little steam-launch commanded by Lieutenant W. B. Cushing, U. S. N., on October 27, 1864.
The public lands, from the sale of which the school money was derived, were those along the Housatonic river. The money was appropriated according to a law enacted in 1732 which distributed it among the older towns as a reward for good schools.
This little boy of the hills, born in sight of the sparkling Housatonic, was to linger out the best part of his life a prisoner or a pauper upon the grimy banks of the Thames. Imagination will easily picture the rural day of the youth of Israel. Let us pass on to a less immature period.
I am afraid it does not belong to me, but I will treat it as I used to treat a stray boat which came through my meadow, floating down the Housatonic, get hold of it and draw it ashore, and hold on to it until the owner turns up.
It was made up of men of almost all conditions of life and of widely different ages, though naturally with young men in a large majority; of mechanics from the Housatonic and Naugatuck valleys, and farmers' boys from the hills; of men of education and men of none.
He was sorry that he missed the Wabash and the admiral, and intensely grieved over the lack of any tidings from the David or her men, which, however, caused him little surprise, but he was glad, indeed, they had been so brilliantly successful in eliminating the magnificent new steam sloop-of-war Housatonic from the force blockading them.
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