Page:Letters of Life.djvu/308

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296
LETTERS OF LIFE.

for every form of hardship, and his liberality in aiding and upholding the laboring classes.

Returning to his native city with the meed of fame and the materials of wealth, he consecrated them to her benefit with a filial warmth, which she had taken little pains to win, and was slow to acknowledge. By the bold design and successful completion of his dike or embankment, he seems to have created a new expanse of land, which he defended against the attacks of the Connecticut, from whose depths it was drawn and consolidated.

When swollen by the reënforcement of melting snows, the proud river returns in spring to the inundated play-places where it had revelled from the beginning, and finds itself excluded, foaming with rage it essays a faint imitation of the waves of the sea, vainly dashing against and battling the immovable parapet.

An immense stone armory, including buildings more than twelve hundred feet in length, and several stories high, filled with his own invented or improved machinery, gave employment to more than a thousand working-men. To these he punctually accorded the wages on which the subsistence of their families depended, erecting for them substantial tenements of brick, and in a range of Swiss cottages kindly consulting the home associations of one class of his immigrants.

A manufacture, whose extent had not been antici-