Connecticut western news., 1914-09-03

 examples to the penple. Charles the twelfth, of London, was in the midst of his stormy career. The profiigate grand monarch" of France, Louis fourteenth was succeeded after his reign of over 70 years by his great grandson, five years old, and the nation was weak, while Frederick the first was pre- pairing, in Prussia, the army of Frederick the Great for the later rise of the nation and the establishment of the German empire under its lead. Russia was governed by the strong hand of Peter the Great.
 That quarter-century was marked in literature, by the hymns of Dr. Watts, beginning of modern hymnology; Pope was the popular poet; Robinson Crusoe the one great story and Voltaire the chief figure in letters and infidelity. It was the time of great financial schemes that have been unsurpassed failures-the Mississippi scheme and the South Sea Bubble. Religiously the two note worthy incidents are Court Linzendorf' s establishment Gf the Moravians at Herrnhut in 1722, and the rise of Methodism in England to which it con tributed. Material and mechanical progress does not seem to have been rapid; Fahrenheit devised his ther- mometer to encourage our talking about the weather and nothing more import ant in science or mechanics belongs to the age so far as I know. Handel be- gan composing; there was an academy of science founded, but the entire period was one of dreary strife, and treaties were being made and broken in swift succession. We wonder that child in an inaccessible part of this town died of starvation the first winter, which was extremely severe, but in France the people were perishing by the thousar1 from the great famine of 1738-40.
 In our own q untry these things had less interest than abroad, but foreign news which was brought by letters privately carried was diligently circu. lated. Yet mol ody knew that George Whitefield had been born in England, whose pulpit eloquence should stir all New England, and cause great excite. ment here when he preached in Sharon in TITO, nor had any heard of the birth in Virginiao of one George Washington, or of that of Galvani, whom we think of as among the early discoverers in the vast and then unexplored realm of electricity, or of Herschel, the pioneer astronomers nativity.
 The population of what is now the United States was then not more than half that of Chicago today, and New Haven has probably as many inhab- itants as the whole colony of Connecti. cut then possessed. Not until many years later was there a turnpiked road or pleasure vehicle. People journeyed on horseback or in ox-carts, and if they were not satisfied with either the speed or comfort of these they were free to travel ly what a former par. ishioner used to call Foot & Walkers Express. :"
 The houses they built were of logs. The furniture was homemade for the most part and large use was made oi chests. Probably here, as at my great greatgrandfather's who settled on wild land about that time, there may have been some one who found a rock with a convenient hollow in it, and drew it beside his we'll to be used as . stationary washbowl. The women spun and wove the flax or wool that the farm provided, and made the gar. ments of the family. The farmer and his wife fashioned the round brooms which within my memory have given place to fiat ones. The simple farm implements were the handiwork of that jack-of all l-trades, the Yankee farmer himself, or the nearest blacksmith. used to see a hoe lying about in my youth that had been hammered out al the anvil, and learned to mow with a handmade scythe, than which never saw better though it was not hand. some. .s.
 But with all the narrowness of their day, and the lack of modern advantages, (which they were fortunately unable to appreciate,) there were some things about their lives for which we may envy them. Colorado and the Colorado U6SblS WcIS uhhuOWu, plhO bI6c weevil, and the Elm tree beetle. They had no hardhack pastures, no Canada thistles, no vegetable butter-and eggs. They travelled no dusty roads, over which fingered the smell of gasoline, or worse yet, petroleum. Millinery bills were small though sun-bunnets were large. Nobody carried off their unin. vented umbrellas or borrowed and broke their moving machines. There were no idle rich, no striking workmen, nc church members who on Sunday were absent from church, though not in bed, for the motor-car had not been dreamed of. Women tended their flowers and often helped in the field and especially at the milking, and had not learned to talk about their nerves. They were able to get along without the smoke of factories and the noise of machinery. They did not celebrate the 4th of July nor Halloween. They had no worries about the price of stocks, the solvency of banks, or the progress of the Brown. tailed and the Gipsy moths. Their orchards needed un snrayinV They