Harvey Arnold.

It was during these struggles to secure railroad outlets and to push forward the interests of the Hoosac Tunnel that the citizens of the town acquired the faculty of standing as a unit for any broad public improvement benefiting the whole community. This spirit was again exemplified in recent years, when the citizens of North Adams united as one man to secure the location of a State Normal School in the city.

While the scenery about Adams and North Adams is as fine as any to be found in Berkshire, fashion has not set the stamp of its approval upon these particular spots as it has upon Lenox, Stockbridge and Pittsfield, in the south part of the county. To many, not only those who know them best, but even to chance visitors, the rugged mountains of the Hoosac and Taconic ranges, with their forest- covered sides, rocky ledges and deep ravines, appeal more powerfully than the beautiful but more subdued and cultivated scenes of southern Berkshire; and it is a satisfactory thing to have this view confirmed by such readers of nature as Thoreau and Hawthorne.

It was in the summer of 1838 that Hawthorne first came to Berkshire; and the story of his visit to North Adams is most delightfully told in the pages of the "Note Books," published many years after by his widow. Hawthorne was, more than most writers, influenced by surrounding scenes, and many of the influences he met in North Adams, influences both of men and mountains, crop out through much of his subsequent work. We can well imagine how the wild beauty of the Natural Bridge and the Bellows Pipe appealed to one his nature; and we can almost see him