The temperance reformers of Europe have spent much eloquence and based much argument upon the more or less casual and scattered observations of private individuals in endeavouring to determine to what extent intemperance influences the commission of crime. What such advocates require to give force to their conclusions is the strength of facts, collected within given limits of space and time, and collated in a systematic manner. These are furnished in two remarkable reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labour Statistics for 1880-1881, which dealt at great length with the relations of crime and intemperance, presenting statistics of a kind which nothing short of a royal commission could procure in this country. It was thus, in the first place, shown that sixty per cent. of all the crimes committed within the limits of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, during a period of twenty years, consisted of "rum offences," drunkenness, illegal liquor dealing, or liquor nuisances. When this fact had been established, the Bureau attacked the question of how far drink was concerned in the forty per cent. balance of crime remaining unaccounted for after the first inquiry? The investigation was long, and, from the nature of the case, a difficult one, but there seems no reason to doubt the accuracy of its very remarkable conclusions. These, in half a dozen words, declare that eighty-four per cent. of all the crime committed in the commonwealth during the twenty

year period in question was caused, either directly or indirectly, by liquor. Only sixteen crimes in every hundred committed by sober men! Well may the hard-headed statistician lose something of his judicial attitude in the closing words of his report on “ Intemperance and Crime." "These figures," says Colonel Wright, "paint a picture at once faithful and hideous of the power of rum, and this investigation, by revealing the disproportionate magnitude of offences due, either directly or indirectly, to liquor, calls for earnest attention at the bar of public opinion and by the public conscience of this commonwealth."

The public conscience has already shut up the public-house in hundreds of New England towns. Let those who are sincerely anxious to know what results may be expected from the interference of public option with private privilege spend, as we did, a Sunday at Winsted. The order of this village, the prosperity of its operative population, the peace and purity of their lives, the independence of their characters and simplicity of their manners will be enough to convince any unprejudiced man, abstainer or not, that no greater blessing has befallen this town than the abolition of its liquor saloons.

CHAPTER V.

AMONG THE BERKSHIRE HILLS: GREAT BARRINGTON.

It was a glorious evening when we left Winsted to push our way westward, over the high divide which separates the minor valleys of the Naugatuck and Mad River from that of the grander Housatonic. For the first half of this journey, the train labours upwards through a wild country, covered with birch woods and strewn with gneissic boulders, while the reclaimed pastures of scattered mountain-farms skirt the railroad track here and there. At the summit, fourteen hundred feet above sea-level, stands Norfolk, a trim white town, full of knitting-mills and surrounded by cultivated land. The last stretches widely on either side of the Blackberry River, a brook near Norfolk, but soon swelling to a considerable stream, which flows westward towards the Housatonic, through a smiling valley of pastures sprinkled with neat farmhouses. The railroad follows the course of this stream, keeping, as usual, upon a terrace of drift which, in this case, is of considerable elevation. Thence the eye wanders down to the sheltered bottoms, where

a line of pale green willows, skirting the stream, announces the lagging spring, and up to the birchen crests which hem in this beautiful dell.

Soon after leaving Norfolk, we came in sight of the Taconic Range, a high and picturesque ridge forming the western boundary of the Housatonic valley. The sun had already declined, and this chain of dome-like hills was clothed in a garment of intense and exquisite blue, which hid every detail of mountain structure and exhibited the range as a silhouette of indigo upon a background of primrose sky. Behind the clear-obscure and enchanting profile of the hills, the misty peaks of the distant Catskills rose in the evening air, reminding us that, between their shadowy slopes and the bluc Taconics, the mighty Hudson was sliding to the sea, freighted with the commerce of half a continent. Presently the train whirled closely past one, then another and another flaming iron furnace, while, high above our heads, the ashy birchen crests of the Blackberry Hills were streaked with pale blue smoke wreaths, rising from the scattered fires of charcoal hearths.

After making a junction with the Whiting River, which flows into it from the north, the Blackberry ceases to be a rapid stream and begins to wind through a level, cultivated plain of considerable extent, one of the intervales of the Housatonic, across which the train runs for several miles before striking the latter river. On the way, we passed the little town of Sheffield, an

island of houses in a sea of ploughed fields and pastures, shaded by giant elms, and the first settlement ever made in the Housatonic valley. Its site was bought, in 1724, from a famous Indian chief, named Konkepot, for £460 in money, three barrels of cider and thirty quarts of rum, while the village which arose on the spot was named after Edmund Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, by Obadiah Noble, the first white settler. This intervale crossed, the railroad sweeps by a wide curve into the Housatonic valley, whose course we followed northward, for a few miles to Great Barrington.

Great Barrington is the chief town of Berkshire, the loveliest county of lovely Western Massachusetts, the home at various times of Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes, Neville and Thoreau, and the theme of Bryant's most melodious song. Nowhere does the Housatonic traverse such beautiful scenery as in its course through the Berkshire Hills. Here, along its western borders, lie the chief domes of the Taconic Range, which rise to heights of two and three thousand feet, concealing their massiveness by flowing outlines and aërial draperies of heavenly blue. Eastwards, the world is shut out by the Hoosacs, a long spur of the Green Mountains, whose summits have hitherto been hidden from us in the narrower valleys. Each of these ranges is but one of the many undulations constituting the Alleghanies, which rise like waves from the Atlantic slope and break towards the west. Along the trough