d not yet exhibited
the Rocket; for travel and transportation the locomotive was unknown,
and the Baltimoreans conceived their scheme while yet uncertain
whether horse-power or _stationary_ steam-engines would be the
best acting force. It was opened as far as Ellicott's Mills as a
horse-road, the idlers and beauties of Baltimore participating in the
excursion as a novel jest. In 1830, Baron Krudener, the envoy from
Russia, rode upon it in a car with sails, called the AEolus, a model
of which he sent to the emperor Nicholas as something new and hopeful.
Passing the Monocacy, we roll over a rich champaign country, based
upon limestone--the garden of the State, and containing the ancient
manor of Carrollton, through whose grounds, by one of its branches,
this road passes for miles. Near by are quarries of Breccia marble--a
conglomerate of cemented variegated pebbles--out of which were cut
the rich pillars in the House of Representatives at Washington. The
Monocacy is crossed, near whose bank lies the bucolic old Maryland
town of Frederick, to attain which a twig of the road wanders off for
the few necessary miles. Soon the piquant charms of Potomac scenery
are at hand, the mountains are marching upon us, and the road becomes
stimulating.

A jagged spur of the Blue Ridge, the Catoctin Mountain, strides out
to the river, and the railroad, striking it, wraps itself around the
promontory in a sharp curve, like a blow with the flat of an elastic
Damascus sword. The broad Potomac sweeps rushing around its base: it
is the celebrated Point of Rocks. The nodding precipice, cut into a
rough and tortured profile by the engineers, lays its shadow to sleep
on the whizzing roofs of the cars as they glitter by, (Shadows always
seem to print themselves with additional distinctness upon any moving
object, like a waterfall or a foaming stream.) There are a village and
a bridge at the Point, and the mountain-range, broken in two by the
river, recovers itself gracefully and loftily on the other side.

[Illustration: POTOMAC TUNNEL, NEAR HARPER'S FERRY.]

For half an hour more, as we rush to meet the course of the Potomac,
the broad ledges that heave the bed of the river into mounds, and
the ascending configuration of the shore, seem to speak of something
grand, and directly we are in the cradle of romance, at Harper's
Ferry.

To reach this village, perhaps the most picturesque in the country,
we must cross the Potomac from Maryland into