The little town itself is a grassy street, with a meeting-house and a hotel, which has a desolate air of mistaken enterprise declining into disappointment, with long anticipation of a crowd of summer pilgrims, who might well turn their steps hither, but who have never come. Beyond the village street upon the same plateau is the great Goshen reservoir, which lies hushed in grim repose over the town of Williamsburg, a few miles below, the town which was overwhelmed some years ago by the bursting of the Mill River dam. Such events are the tragedies of the hills, which become traditions told in the village store, and investing with dignity, as the years pass, the villagers who recall the direful day. Among the traditions of Goshen is that of the passage of some of the soldiers of Burgoyne on their march from Saratoga to Cambridge. When the brilliant British general swept down Lake Champlain to the Hudson, capturing Ticonderoga as he came, it was feared in these hills that he would march triumphantly from Albany to Boston. There was a general rally of all able-bodied men to the rescue; and as they marched away from their fields ripe for the harvest the prospect was dismal, until the able-bodied women marched into the fields and gathered and housed the crops. The British invaders reached Goshen, indeed, on their march from Albany to Boston, but only as prisoners of war. All this peaceful neighborhood was originally granted by the State to the heirs of soldiers in the early New England wars. Goshen and its neighbor Chesterfield, another city set upon a hill six or seven miles to the south, were grants to the descendants of soldiers in the Narragansett expedition of King Philip's war. From Goshen the Chesterfield meeting-house can be seen against the southern horizon, and the road lies through high pastures and lonely farms to the pleasant town. When you climb its hill and look around, you see a cluster of hospitable houses, around which the neatly kept grounds give an air of refinement to the whole village, which is steeped in rural tranquillity. The broad hills slope westward towards the valley of the Westfield, and beyond lie the shaggy sides of the Cummington range. Chesterfield has its special tradition of Lafayette passing the night in its old tavern, on his way from Albany to Boston, in 1824. It is a characteristic representative of the hill towns, so still that the air seems drowsy as in Rip Van Winkle's village. But such tranquil towns, in which a moving figure is half spectral and almost a surprise, were the beginnings of the nation. From these sequestered springs the mighty river flows.