"VIEW OF THE TAKING OF QUEBECK BY THE ENGLISH FORCES COMMANDED BY GENERAL WOLFE, SEPTEMBER 13TH, 1759."

From an old copperplate engraving published in London in 1760.

bridge, from which the boards had been washed away since he passed early in the day. This story is told, perfectly authenticated, I should say, of one of the streams which flows into Lake Champlain. It is told just as well authenticated in Berkshire County in Massachusetts. And a correspondent tells me that the same story is. told of the Ausable River in New York. The reader may judge whether the same thing happened three times. What I know is that it might have happened at any of these gorges. The walls of the torrent in all cases are a sort of slaty shale which rises perpendicular from the water.

The civilized history of Vermont begins only when the incursions of Indians and Jesuits ceased with Wolfe's victory at Quebec. Then began an enthusiasm for settlement of those beautiful valleys. There are still extant the records of the parties which were sent from one or another town of Connecticut, Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, and some of their marching songs. Thus there grew up the sturdy set of Green Moun

tain boys who give such picturesqueness to the

history of that whole region. In 1777 the English

governors of Canada hoped that they should

seduce these people from

allegiance to the Continental Congress, which had never done anything for them. An officer of rank was imprudent enough to try to seduce Ethan Allen when Allen was a prisoner in New York. He told Allen that he should be the colonel of a regiment, should be presented to the king, and should have "a large

tract of land either in the

ETHAN ALLEN.

"In the Name of the Great Jeho

New Hampshire Grants

vah and the Continental Con- or in Connecticut."

gress!"

Ethan Allen replied: "I

told him that if by faithfulness I had recom

mended myself to General Howe, I should be loath by unfaithfulness to lose the governor's good opinion. Besides that, I viewed the offer of land to be similar to that which the devil offered Jesus Christ, 'to give him all the kingdoms of the world if he would fall down and worship him,' when at the same time the damned soul had not a foot of land on earth."

From that day to this day Vermont has earned the name, among people who know anything about it, of a model democracy. I wish that one of the intelligent Swiss writers on government would come over here to see how they do things in Vermont. You see, there are no very large cities. Burlington, the largest of them all, is a model city for the world to take note of and keep in memory.

I like to put in here a description of Burlington which I made in a speech before Alpha Delta Phi at its annual convention in New York in 1888. I had had, not long before, a friendly passage with Matthew Arnold, who had said rather carelessly that there was nothing "distinguished" in America.