suffering at Frederick. General Wool still walked the corridors,
inexpansive, with Fort McHenry on his shoulders, and Baltimore in his
breeches-pocket, and his courteous aid again pressed upon me his kind
offices. About the doors of the hotel the news-boys cried the papers in
plaintive, wailing tones, as different from the sharp accents of their
Boston counterparts as a sigh from the southwest is from a northeastern
breeze. To understand what they said was, of course, impossible to any
but an educated ear, and if I made out "Starr" and "Clipp'rr," it was
because I knew beforehand what must be the burden of their advertising
coranach.

I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday the twenty-third,
there beyond question to meet my Captain, once more united to his brave
wounded companions under that roof which covers a household of as noble
hearts as ever throbbed with human sympathies. Back River, Bush River,
Gunpowder Creek,--lives there the man with soul so dead that his memory
has cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the same envelopes
with their meaningless localities? But the Susquehanna,--the broad,
the beautiful, the historical, the poetical Susquehanna,--the river of
Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the shores where

"Aye those sunny mountains half-way down
Would echo flageolet from some romantic town,"--

did not my heart renew its allegiance to the poet who has made it lovely
to the imagination as well as to the eye, and so identified his fame
with the noble stream that it "rolls mingling with his fame forever?"
The prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the fact that a
great sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes him, sitting
in the car, on its back, and swims across with him like Arion's
dolphin,--also that mercenary men on board offer him canvas-backs in the
season, and ducks of lower degree at other periods.

At Philadelphia again at last! Drive fast, O colored man and brother, to
the house called Beautiful, where my Captain lies sore wounded, waiting
for the sound of the chariot wheels which bring to his bedside the face
and the voice nearer than any save one to his heart in this his hour of
pain and weakness! Up a long street with white shutters and white steps
to all the houses. Off at right angles into another long street with
white shutters and white steps to all the houses. Off again at another
right angle into still another long street with white shutter