tep high, as though not to trip upon them,
and then to pause with one foot in one land and one in another, trying
to imagine that I feel the division running through my body.

Harper's Ferry is an entrancing old town; a drowsy place, piled up
beautifully, yet carelessly, upon terraced roads clinging to steep
hills, which slope on one side to the Potomac, on the other to the
Shenandoah, and come to a point, like the prow of a great ship, at the
confluence of the two.

There is something foreign in the appearance of the place. Many times,
as I looked at old stone houses, a story or two high on one side, three
or four stories on the other, seeming to set their claws into the cliffs
and cling there for dear life, I thought of houses in Capri and Amalfi,
and in some towns in France; and again there were low cottages built of
blocks of shale covered with a thin veneer of white plaster showing the
outlines of the stones beneath, which, squatting down amid their trees
and flowers, resembled peasant cottages in Normandy or Brittany, or in
Ireland.

It is a town in which to ramble for an hour, uphill, down and around;
stopping now to delight in a crumbling stone wall, tied together with
Kenilworth ivy; now to watch a woman making apple butter in a great iron
pot; now to see an old negro clamber slowly into his rickety wagon, take
up the rope reins, and start his skinny horse with the surprising words:
"Come hither!"; now to look at an old tangled garden, terraced rudely up
a hillside; now to read the sign, on a telegraph pole in the village,
bearing the frank threat: "If you Hitch your Horses Here they will be
Turned Loose." Now you will come upon a terraced road, at one side of
which stands an old house draped over the rocks in such a way as to
provide entrance from the ground level, on any one of three stories; or
an unexpected view down a steep roadway, or over ancient moss-grown
housetops to where, as an old book I found there puts it, "between two
ramparts, in a gorge of savage grandeur, the lordly Potomac takes to his
embrace the beautiful Shenandoah."

The liaison between the rivers, described in this Rabelaisian manner by
the author of "The Annals of Harper's Ferry," has been going on for a
long time with all the brazen publicity of a love scene on a park bench.
I recommend the matter to the attention of the Society for the
Suppression of Vice, which once took action to prohibit a novel by Mr.
Theodore Dreiser. A grea