But these huge trees at Wethersfield and Windsor, under which the infant plantations of Connecticut were made, were less valuable than the large old oak at Hartford, which afterwards became more famous for standing mute, and hiding its secrets, than the talking oak of Tennyson. Ten years later, in 1638, New Haven was founded, built from the first on the square; its long sand-reaches cooled in the shade of branches that waved frequent welcomes to successive bands of settlers. But a shadier event for Charles I. occurred this year in England, in the detention of John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell, with all their traps and plunder, after it and they had been safely stowed away under hatches on board ship. How little do we know what’s in the wind? Had it blown that day southwest instead of northeast, Charles I. might have worn his handsome but worthless head many years longer; the Stuart family to-day might perhaps be occupying the state chair of Victoria and the heavy Hanoverians; and the descendants of Messrs. Cromwell and Hampden be keeping store in some of our villages, or even got so low as to become aldermen, members of assembly, or even descended to the House of Representatives. The same year John Harvard left a donation of three thousand dollars to a select school, founded two years previously at Newtown, which took his money and name. From this small, yet early laid foundation, Harvard College has since got up several Storeys; and although Sparks have been applied to the edifice, it still stands, like a tower set on a hill, diffusing its learned light to Holmes happy and genial, reaching upward to Longfellow, and even illuminating men Whittier than he. We have now briefly traced the settlements of five of the New England States, bringing down their history to 1643, when, with the exception of spunky Rhode Island, they formed their first union against the witty but out-witted French of Acadia on the northeast, the trading, solid Dutch of Manhattan, and the universally hostile Indian tribes, whose enmity now became in the inverse ratio of their hunting-grounds. The sixth of these States, Vermont, came late and strugglingly among her brothers and sisters. Both New York and New Hampshire pouted and grumbled at the appearance of the new-comer, and threatened to smother her in the cradle. But the child, fed on simple food, and breathing the healthy air of the Green Mountains, grew apace after its birth in 1724, and got such a good Constitution in 1777, that she at length acquired all her rights; and what by fishing in the Connecticut, hunting among her evergreen hills, and keeping to her mutton and her last, she looked as she sat in the old continental schoolhouse as fresh, blooming, and thrifty as any. Vermont early sent away her surplus beef and swine, but she kept plenty of pluck at home.