XXVII. Requiescat in pace




ISRAEL POTTER

Fifty Years of Exile




CHAPTER I.

THE BIRTHPLACE OF ISRAEL.


The traveller who at the present day is content to travel in the good
old Asiatic style, neither rushed along by a locomotive, nor dragged by
a stage-coach; who is willing to enjoy hospitalities at far-scattered
farmhouses, instead of paying his bill at an inn; who is not to be
frightened by any amount of loneliness, or to be deterred by the
roughest roads or the highest hills; such a traveller in the eastern
part of Berkshire, Massachusetts, will find ample food for poetic
reflection in the singular scenery of a country, which, owing to the
ruggedness of the soil and its lying out of the track of all public
conveyances, remains almost as unknown to the general tourist as the
interior of Bohemia.

Travelling northward from the township of Otis, the road leads for