112 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



at Meriden, a small manufacturing town in Connecticut, in- 

 volving a railway journey of nearly two hundred miles each 

 way. I stayed with Mr. Robert Bowman, an Englishman 

 and a manufacturer of plated goods, who had been thirty years 

 in America. Much of the country I passed through, as well 

 as that round Meriden itself, was picturesque with rock and 

 mountain and rapid streams, yet the whole effect was, as I 

 noted in my journal, "scraggy as usual," while an American 

 writer declares that the whole country " has been reduced to 

 a state of unkempt and sordid ugliness." But I am pretty 

 sure that the more naturally picturesque parts of this New 

 England country must be very beautiful in spring and early 

 summer, when the abundant vegetation would conceal and 

 beautify that which is bare and ugly in winter. The climate, 

 too, is unfavourable to that amount of verdure which we can 

 show throughout the year ; while the universality of old 

 irregular hedgerows in our lowland districts gives a finish 

 and a charm to our scenery which is wholly wanting 

 where straight lines of split-wood fences are almost equally 

 universal. 



My next lecture was at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, on 

 the way to which I had agreed to pay a visit to Professor 

 Marsh, at Newhaven, where I arrived on the evening of 

 November 26. My host, who was a bachelor and very 

 wealthy, had built himself an eccentric kind of house, the 

 main feature of which was a large octagonal hall, full of 

 trophies collected during his numerous explorations in the 

 far West, and used as a reception and dining-room, with 

 pretty suites of visitors' rooms opening out of it — a roomy 

 kind of solidly built bungalow. It is situated near the 

 Peabody Museum of Yale College, where there was at that 

 time the largest collection of fossil skeletons, chiefly of 

 mammals and reptiles of America, to be seen anywhere. The 

 next morning was devoted to seeing these wonderful remains 

 of an extinct world, among which were the huge bones of the 

 atlantosaurus, a reptile near a hundred feet long and thirty 

 feet high, supposed to be the largest land animal that has 

 ever existed. The remarkable horned dinosauria, the flying 



