Ascending the river, the factory settlements of Lonsdale, Ashton, Albion and Manville are passed, and we come to Woonsocket Hill, one of the highest in Rhode Island. Here the river goes around various bends admirably arranged for conducting its waters through the mills, and the town of Woonsocket is built where twenty thousand people make cotton and woollen cloths, the noted "Harris cassimere" having been long the chief manufacture at the Social Mills. To the northward, Woonsocket spreads into the towns of Blackstone and Waterford, also industrial hives; and finally, having followed the river up to its sources, the route leads to Worcester, the second city of Massachusetts, forty-five miles west of Boston, styled the "heart of the Commonwealth," with a population of over one hundred thousand people. Its chief newspaper, the _Massachusetts Spy_, is noted as having actually started as a spy upon the royalists in the exciting times preceding the Revolutionary War, and is still a prosperous publication. It was at a Worcester banquet in 1776 that the "Sons of Freedom" drank the noted toast: "May the freedom and independence of America endure till the sun grows dim with age and this earth returns to chaos; perpetual itching without the benefit of scratching to the enemies of America!" Worcester is a great manufacturing city, but has almost lost its New England population from the steady Yankee migration westward, they being replaced in its numerous mills by French Canadians, Swedes and Irish, the latter predominating. It has a noble Soldiers' Monument, a splendid railway station, and the fine buildings of the Massachusetts Lunatic Asylum standing on the highest hill in the suburbs. Its new white marble City Hall, completed in 1898, is an imposing edifice. The huge Washburn & Moen Wire Works are on Salisbury Pond, in the outskirts. Among the interesting old dwellings is the Bancroft House, where the historian, George Bancroft, was born, in 1800, dying in 1891. The great attraction of Worcester is Lake Quinsigamond, on the eastern verge, a long, deep, narrow loch, stretching among the hills four miles away, with little gems of islands and villa-bordered shores. Scattered over the distant rim of enclosing hills are several typical Yankee villages, with their church-spires set against the horizon. Worcester had a chequered colonial career, the Indians repeatedly driving out the early settlers, until they built a fortress-like church on the Common, where each man attended on the Sabbath, carrying his musket. These resolute colonists were Puritans, bent on enforcing their own ideas, for when a few Scotch Presbyterians came in 1720, and built a church of that creed, it was declared a "cradle of heresy" and demolished. A considerable number of the French Acadians, exiled from Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century, came to Worcester, and their descendants are now among its prominent people.