The city of New Haven, the most populous in Connecticut, having a hundred thousand people, is built upon a plain, surrounded by hills, at the head of a deep bay extending several miles northward from Long Island Sound. The magnificent elms, arching over the streets and the Public Green, and grandly rising in stately rows, make the earliest and the deepest impression upon the visitor. In one of his most eloquent passages, Henry Ward Beecher said that the elms of New England are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture. The grand foliage-arched avenues of New Haven are unsurpassed elsewhere, so that they are the crowning glory as well as the constant care of the townsfolk. Among the finest is the avenue separating the Yale College grounds from the Public Green--a magnificent Gothic aisle of the richest foliage-covered interlacing boughs. The Indian name for the region round about New Haven was Quinnepiack, and the placid Quinnepiack River, coming from the northward, flows through a deep valley past the towering East Rock into the harbor. Old John Davenport was the leader and first pastor of the infant colony that settled here. He was a powerful Anglican parish pastor of London who had joined the Puritans, and in 1637 was forced to leave for New England with many of his people. They spent a year in Boston, but in April, 1638, sailed around Cape Cod to the Sound, and landed at Quinnepiack, where they laid out a town plan with nine squares for buildings, surrounding a large central square, the Public Green. At the foundation, Davenport delivered a most impressive sermon from the text, "Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars;" and from this came the original scheme of government for the colony by the seven leading church members, who were known as the "seven pillars." The colony got on well with the Indians, who revered Davenport, calling him "so big study man." They bought the whole tract of one hundred and thirty square miles from the Indians for thirteen coats. At first, however, they did not prosper, their trading ventures proving unfortunate, and they determined to abandon the place and remove elsewhere, selecting Jamaica, and afterwards Galloway in Ireland. The ship carrying their prospectors to Ireland sailed in January, 1647, but was never heard from afterwards, save when, as the legend has it, "the spectre of the ship sailed into the harbor in the teeth of a head-wind, and when in full view of the anxious people, it slowly melted into thin air and vanished." Then they decided to remain, and getting on better, in 1665 united their plantation with that of Connecticut at Hartford, under the condition that each should be a capital, a compact observed until 1874, when Hartford was made the sole capital. The British in July, 1779, attacked and partly burnt and plundered the town, the Americans galling them by desultory attacks as they passed through the streets.