State of Connecticut
resembled the royal city of Israel, after which it was named, in one
point only. It was perched upon the top of a hill, encircled by gentle
valleys which divided it from an outer ring of hills still more
elevated, almost mountainous. But, except this position in the centre
of the stage, you would find nothing theatrical or striking about the
little New England hill-town: no ivory palaces to draw down the
denunciations of a minor prophet, no street of colonnades to girdle the
green eminence with its shining pillars, not even a dirty
picturesqueness such as now distinguishes the forlorn remnant of the
once haughty city of Omri and of Herod.

Neat, proper, reserved, not to say conventional, the Connecticut
Samaria concealed its somewhat chilly architectural beauties beneath a
veil of feathery elms and round-topped maples. It was not until you had
climbed the hill from the clump of houses and shops which had grown up
around the railway station,--a place of prosperous ugliness and
unabashed modernity,--that you perceived the respectable evidences of
what is called in America "an ancient town." The village green, and
perhaps a half dozen of the white wooden houses which fronted it with
their prim porticoes, were possibly a little more than a hundred years
old. The low farmhouse, which showed its gambrel-roof and square brick
chimney a few rods down the northern road, was a relic of colonial
days. The stiff white edifice with its pointed steeple, called in
irreverent modern phrase the "Congo" church, claimed an equal
antiquity; but it had been so often repaired and "improved" to suit the
taste of various epochs, that the traces of Sir Christopher Wren in its
architecture were quite confused by the admixture of what one might
describe as the English Sparrow style.

The other buildings on the green, or within sight of it along the roads
north, south, east, and west, had been erected or built-over at
different periods, by prosperous inhabitants or returning natives who
wished to have a summer cottage in their birth-place. These structures,
although irreproachable in their moral aspect, indicated that the
development of the builder's art in Samaria had not followed any known
historical scheme, but had been conducted along sporadic lines of
imitation, and interrupted at least once by a volcanic outbreak of the
style named, for some inscrutable reason, after Queen Anne. On the
edges of the hill, looking off in