as I afterwards learned, the Pilgrim Fathers adopted from the natives. "Pie-plant pie" was a surprise, being nothing else than rhubarb tart, predestinarian Puritanism having early recognized and acknowledged by name the manifest destiny of this useful vegetable. The midday meal was soon despatched, the orderly, respectable crowd strolled off to the various factories, and we found ourselves, after a temperate repast, fit for any amount more work, while the day was as yet hardly half-spent.

The most interesting and newest factory in Ansonia is that of the Postal Telegraph Company, where Professor Farmer's patent compound telegraph wire is now being manufactured on a very large scale. It is not long since the American press startled the world of science by announcing that a telephonic conversation had been carried on successfully between Chicago and New York, cities which are more than a thousand miles asunder, a distance forty or fifty-fold greater than the length of any ordinary telephone line.

A telegraph line may be regarded as a road, along which electric currents travel from a battery at one end of the wire to some form of mechanism which is capable of recording the passage of such currents at the other. These currents are never very powerful, and sometimes, as in the case of the telephone, almost infinitely feeble; so that, if we figure them to our minds as wheeled carriages in movement, we can understand that their motion

will be greatly influenced by the comparative roughness or smoothness of the road they traverse. All the metals, as is well known, are "conductors" of electricity, or, in other words, offer little resistance to its passage through their substance, but they are so in very different degrees. Of the commercial metals, copper offers scarcely any resistance to the passage of electric currents, but cannot be advantageously used for line wires, because it bears little tension, stretches excessively, soon loses its elasticity, and is much affected by temperature. Iron wire, on the other hand, being cheap and superior to copper in all the points just enumerated, has come into universal use for telegraph wire, notwithstanding its comparatively high resistance to the passage of electric currents. The idea of plating a steel core with a copper skin and thus combining the strength of one metal with the conductivity of the other, was entertained many years ago, but was never successfully reduced to practice. Electroplating, by means of batteries, was found much too slow and expensive a process for covering such lengths of wire as were required, while there was not sufficient adhesion between the deposited copper and the steel core to permit of the compound wire being lengthened by the process of "wire-drawing." Professor Farmer's advance on what had previously been accomplished consists in employing the very powerful currents obtainable from dynamo-electric machines, in combination with a simple but very ingenious plan of passing coils

of wire of any length continuously through the plating

vats.

We enter a great one-storied building, some two hundred and fifty feet square, at one end of which stand twenty-four large dynamos, weighing together some sixty tons. These are driven by engines of six hundred horse-power, and the resulting current of electricity is carried through thick copper bands to the electro-plating tanks. If one wishes for a demonstration of the tremendous energy which courses silently through these conductors, it is sufficient to divert a very small portion of the current and pass it through a rod of carbon, such as is commonly used in the electric lamp. This is soon made to glow with an intense white heat, and is finally deflagrated in a burst of brilliant flame. When the factory has been once or twice illuminated by the lightning-like flash of this experiment, the mind recognizes something akin to the silence which heralds a thunderstorm in the unusual quiet of this singular workshop.

Two hundred and fifty wooden troughs, each about twenty feet long, constitute the battery of plating vats. These are arranged in rows, and contain an electrolytic fluid, as usual in ordinary electro-plating. Over cach trough a longitudinal spindle turns slowly round in bearings, and from this, like rings on a stick, hang as many spires of a coil of steel wire as the tank will contain. Each spire is separated from its neighbour by a slip of glass, while that part of the steel-wire coil

which cannot find room in the tank depends from the revolving spindle which overhangs it for this purpose. In this way the wire is, so to speak, screwed slowly through the electrolytic bath, from which it issues coated with a copper envelope. The operation is repeated three times and results in the deposition of four thousand pounds of copper per day upon eight miles of the steel core, the two together forming a conductor rather less than a quarter of an inch in diameter, weighing seven hundred pounds to the mile and composed of copper and steel in the proportion of five to two. The largest wire used in telegraphy resists the passage of the current with five times more energy than its new rival, while it is nearly twice the diameter, proportionately heavier and of no greater tensional strength than the compound wire.

Already Professor Farmer's line stretches from New York to Chicago and will span the United States before these words are printed. A thousand words have been transmitted a thousand miles in one minute, and ten messages sent over it simultaneously, five each way, for the same distance. Telephonic conversation has been carried on by its means between cities separated by nearly half the Continent, and the men who listened in Ansonia to speakers in Chicago believe that the whisper of a human voice will yet make itself heard from the Atlantic to the Pacific shore.

CHAPTER III.

CLOCKLAND.

ASCENDING the Naugatuck valley for a few miles, we reached Waterbury, a town of twenty thousand inhabitants and the capital of Clockland, where, within a radius of twenty miles, more clocks are made than in any other part of the world. There is, indeed, a hint, in the scenery of Naugatuck, of that other watch country, Switzerland, whose industrious people till their ungrateful mountain farms in summer and make watches in their chalêts during winter. Here is the same rough country and poor farming land, but the people are congregated in great factories, where thousands of clocks are made every day, by means of beautiful special machinery.

Fifty years ago, a clock was an heirloom, even in wellto-do American families, but scarcely any home is without one to-day, and this change has been brought about by the skill and enterprise of the Connecticut man. Towards the close of the last century Eli Terry established him