And the mountains! An electric railway threads the principal thoroughfares and binds the city to Springfield, the mother city, on the south, from heart to heart nine miles; its music is also heard far north along ancient Northampton street, fraught with memories of the centuries and adorned with many modern homes, and further still into Mountain Park, where thousands throng the crags and peaks to taste invigorating air and look down upon the plains and wooded hills and rapid river and the rural homes beyond, while crouching in the river's bend and reaching back far up the hills and over the teeming plains, the lusty city of mills appears still and peaceful in the distance. Farther still Mt. Tom stands up against the western sky, more than eleven hundred feet high. The mysterious electric power despises equally height and distance. The mountain's rugged head is capped by a spacious pavilion, visible from all the region around. The building is provided with telescopes, and from its arched openings the citizens of distant states and countries look out upon forty towns, save one; upon Greylock, Toby, Sugar Loaf, Monadnock in New Hampshire, the Green Mountains in Vermont and the Meriden Mountains in Connecticut; upon lakes and streams and valleys. Beautiful for situation, a true expression of the arts which wait on useful industry, the direct inheritance, moral and intellectual, from that band of state builders who crossed the sea and trod the forest path to found the mother city of this valley, she well maintains the standard of her mechanic arts and of her moral and intellectual life and hastens to justify the fondest aspirations of her founders.
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