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sight and delight the imagination. The man of refined senti- 

 ment and cuUivated mind, with a taste for rural scenery, might 

 pass at least a month in this county with continually new and 

 rich gratification in exploring its many agreeable rides and 

 varied objects of curiosity. 



The Connecticut river cuts this territory through its whole 

 breadth. Standing on an eminence in Gill, near its banks, 

 and contemplating its course through the valley of Northfield, 

 with its wide and fertile meadows, its hills crowned with 

 verdure, its grand mountain scenery in the distance, and the 

 village of Northfield with its modest steeples and its white 

 houses in the centre, worn as it were like a gem on its bosom, 

 the prospect is one of remarkable interest and beauty. Fol- 

 lowing the river in its course, you soon reach its junction with 

 Miller's river, and its transit over Turner's falls, a rocky barrier 

 which seeks in vain to impede its progress, and over which, at 

 periods of high water, it pours its broken and impetuous stream 

 with peculiar grandeur and magnificence. Here too the mind 

 and heart are stirred by the recollections of the perils and strug- 

 gles of former and yet not very distant days, when a body of 

 the aborigines were driven from the shores in their canoes by 

 their enemies in pursuit, and, swept away by the current, per- 

 ished in their terrific descent down this foaming cataract. 



As you descend the river, which, after its passage over the 

 falls, spreads itself out into a quiet and placid stream, you soon 

 reach the foot of Sugar-Loaf mountain, which, on the side 

 towards the river, rears its naked and perpendicular front of red 

 sand-stone ; and on the road round its base seems, in its over- 

 hanging cliff's, to threaten the destruction of the unwary trav- 

 eller. This mountain, which appears to form a part of the up- 

 heaving which first presents itself at New Haven, in Connecti- 

 cut, and extends far into the interior, in several of its aspects 

 is one of the most picturesque objects any where to be 

 found. On one side, the mountain is not diflicult of ascent, 

 and the view presented from its summit is sufficient to compen- 

 sate for the toil of the ascent, if it were a hundred times more 



