Then the winding reaches of the Agawam lead through broad meadows and past many mills to Springfield. The various streams around the Armory City, like so much of the clear waters elsewhere in Massachusetts, are largely devoted to paper-making, and eastward from Springfield the railroad ascends the valley of the swift-flowing Chicopee, meaning the "large spring," among more paper-mills. This is a vast industry developed by the pure, clean waters of Central Massachusetts. Farther eastward, however, the character of the mills changes, and at Brookfield shoemaking villages appear, while elsewhere there are textile and leather factories. Brookfield was the birthplace, in 1818, of the noted female agitator Lucy Stone, its Quaboag Pond furnishing the water turning the mill-wheels, and then flowing off through Podunk meadows by the Sashaway River to the Chicopee. At Spencer, not far away, was born in 1819 Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing-machine. Farther eastward the railway route leads to Worcester, and thence to Boston. THE LAND OF NONOTUCK. The valley of the Connecticut north of Springfield is a hive of busy industries where are made most of the finer papers used in the United States. All the tributary water-courses teem with factories. Four miles above Springfield the Chicopee flows in from the eastern hills, there being a population of twenty thousand, and the mills, served by the power from its falls two miles eastward, working cotton and wool, brass and bronze, as well as making paper. Chicopee Falls was the home of Edward Bellamy, author of _Looking Backward_, who died in 1898. A few miles above the Chicopee, on the Connecticut, are the Hadley Falls, the greatest water-power of New England, and the creator of Holyoke, with fifty thousand people, the chief manufactory of fine papers in the world. In a little more than a mile the river descends sixty feet in falls and rapids, and by a system of canals the water is led for three miles along the banks, thus serving the factories, which have great advantages of position, as the river winds around them on three sides, and its flow is also supplemented by steam-power. The water, from its great descent, is used several times over. The main Hadley fall descends thirty feet, and to prevent erosion is aproned with stout timbers sheathed with boiler iron. The river is bridled by a huge dam one thousand feet long, and has a boom to catch the floating logs.