Pictures from Italy and American Notes Author:Charles Dickens Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. WOKCESTER. THE CONNECTICUT RIVER. HARTFORD. NEW HAVEN. TO NEW YORK. Leaving Boston on the afternoon of Saturday the fifth of February, we procee... more »ded by another railroad to Worcester: a pretty New-England town, where we had arranged to remain under the hospitable roof of the Governor of the State, until Monday morning. These towns and cities of New England (many of which would be villages in Old England) are as favorable specimens of rural America as Iheir people are of rural Americans. The well-trimmed lawns and green meadows of home are not there ; and the grass, compared with our ornamental plots and pastures, is rank, and rough, and wild : but delicate slopes of land, gently- swelling hills, wooded valleys, and slender streams, abound. Every little colony of houses has its church and school - house peeping from among the white roofs and shady trees; every house is the whitest of the white; every Venetian blind the greenest of the green ; every fine day's sky the bluest of the blue. A sharp dry wind and a slight frost had so hardened the roads when we alighted at Worcester, that their furrowed tracks were like ridges of granite. There was the usual aspect of newness on every object, of course. All the buildings looked as if they had been built and paintedthat morning, and could be taken down on Monday with very little trouble. In the keen evening air, every sharp outline looked a hundred times sharper than ever. The clean card - board colonnades had no more perspective than a Chinese bridge on a tea-cup, and appeared equally well calculated for use. The razor-like edges of the detached cottages seemed to cut the very wind as it whistled against them, and to send it smarting on its way with a shriller cry than before. Those slightly-built wooden dwellings behin...« less