A marked providence, as it seemed to Mr. Beecher, opened the way to his preaching on trial in Litchfield, Connecticut. He made a good impression; the people were unanimous and eager in their call; the Presbytery gave its consent; and now, without a doubt that it is according to the will of God, the decision is made, and the home which had first been planted within the sound of the ocean surf at East Hampton, Long Island, in 1799, was transplanted to the quiet inland village of Litchfield in 1810. CHAPTER II. Litchfield—Situation—Natural Features—Early Settlers—Social and Moral Advantages—Patriotism—North Street Described—The Beecher Home—Birth of Henry Ward—The Times at Home and Abroad—His Birth-Mark. As Henry Ward was perfectly satisfied with the parents that bore him, so he was with the place in which he was born. “Surely old Litchfield,” he says, “was a blessed place for one’s birth and childhood. Although there were no mountains, there were hills, the oldest-born of mountains, high, round, and innumerable. Great trees there were, full of confidences with the wind that chastised them in winter and kissed and caressed them all the summer.” The hills referred to were “Prospect” and “Mount Tom” on the west, “Chestnut Hill” on the east, and others like them but unnamed—the “high, round, and innumerable” ones of which he speaks, and which together formed, with their sloping sides and valleys between, that broad and irregular plateau of elevated land, extending for miles on either side, in the midst of which the village of Litchfield is situated. A country of hills, with that wide and picturesque horizon which only such a landscape can furnish, where the irregular outline appears as walls and watch-towers for the protection of the home territory, with here and there an open door, through which the imagination of youth or the feet of maturer years may pass out into the great world of sunshine or of cloud beyond. Litchfield Hill itself, on which the village stands, is more than a thousand feet above sea-level, “high and broad-backed,” and belongs, with all its fellows, to the Green Mountain range, which, beginning near the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sweeps in an irregular curve to the seaboard at Long Island Sound, the back-bone of this great New England peninsula. High enough to be breezy and healthy, but not so high as to be unfertile, and sloping to the south, it afforded then, as now, all the inducements for residence which sun, soil, pure air, and a beautiful landscape could furnish.