CHAPTER IV VERMONT VERMONT is a region of wonderful picturesque beauty. The fields are very fertile, and it has proved to have great agricultural resources. For myself, I have never seen fields of clover which compared with the rich clover fields of Vermont when clover is in blossom. I suppose there are such fields elsewhere, but I never saw them. All the same, the first English settlement of Vermont was as late as the year 1724, when Fort Dummer, in the southern part of the state, was established by the province of Massachusetts. But, as has been said, no considerable number of settlers went in until the Peace of 1762 made that frontier of New England secure against foreign invasion. It was a frontier state, and, as I said in speaking of Maine just now, it was a field of war, not of peace. For some reason or other there were no native residents there at the time when our first white colonists landed, so men say. It seems to have been, I think, by a sort of common consent on the part of the Indians who lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York, that when, in hunting, the Indians met each other there they did not cut each other's throats. I am apt to think, however, also, that if a party of Iroquois crossed from central New York into that region, they would have fought against the Indians of New England, who were their standing enemies. Remember that the Iroquois vocabulary was absolutely different from that of the New England tribes, and all their methods of social life and their warfare differed. Has any one ever heard of a New England Indian burning a prisoner to death, as the Iroquois undoubtedly often did? Anyway, what is sure is that there was no resident population of Indians in what we call Vermont, though in summer they went down to Lake Champlain, having fished and hunted deer up and down through the valleys. While the New Hampshire mountains rest mostly on granite, the mountain range of the Green Mountains which runs through Vermont rests on slates and shales which are often tipped up almost perpendicularly. So it happens that the mountains of Vermont are more picturesque, on the whole, than are the New Hampshire moun GENERAL WOLFE. tains. That sort of pud dingy aspect which people criticise in our dear Mount Washington hardly appears in the Green Mountains. For the same reason the river gorges are more like the cañons of the West than any other valleys in New England. The story is a familiar one of the country doctor who, pressing his horse home at midnight over a bridge which he had crossed by daylight, found the horse very unwilling to go. It proved next day that he had pressed the horse along a stringpiece of the |