Danbury Times

Pen-Portraits of our Towns.

Dr. Holmes, in the December Atlantic, thus appreciatingly minitures the chief places on the railroad route from New York to Boston,-catching their points as he whirls homeward from this "Hunt after the Captain" at the seat of war:-

"Bridgeport, waiting for Irinistan to rise from its ruins with all its pacemix egg domes,-bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown again, iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that look like billiard tables, with hay cocks lying about for balls, -romantic with West Rock and its legends,--cursed with a detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dure must be the frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform, —with its neat carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college dormitories, its vistas of elms and its disheveled weeping willows; Hartford, substantial, well-bridged, many-steepled city,-every conical spire an extinguisher of some nineteenth century heresy, so onward, by and across the broad, shallow Connecticut,-dull red road and dark river woven in like warp and woof by the shuttle of the darting engine; then Springfield, the wide meadowed, well-feeding, horse-loving, hot summered, giant-troed town,-city among villages, village among cities; Worcester, with its Daedalian labyrinth of crossing railroad bars, where the snorting Minotaurs, breathing fire and smoke