et above the tide.

The interest of the staircase we have run up depends greatly on its
pioneer character. No mountain-chain had been crossed by a locomotive
before the Alleghanies were outraged, as we see them, here and by this
track. As the railroad we follow was the first to take existence in
this country, excepting some short mining roads, so the grade here
used was the first of equal steepness, saving on some English roads of
inferior length and no mountainous prestige. Here the engineer, like
Van Arnburgh in the lion's den, first planted his conqueror's foot
upon the mane of the wilderness; and 'in this spot modern science
first claimed the right to reapply that grand word of a French
monarch, "_Il n'y a plus de Pyrenees_!"

[Illustration: VALLEY FALLS, WEST VIRGINIA.]

We are on the crest of the Alleghanies. On either side of the
mountain-pass we have threaded rise the higher summits of the range;
but, though we seem from the configuration of the land to be in
a valley, we are met at every turn by the indications familiar to
mountain-tops--indications that are not without a special desolation
and pathos. Though all is green with summer, we can see that the
vegetation has had a dolorous struggle for existence, and that the
triumph of certain sparse trees here and there is but the survival
of the strongest. They stand scattered and scraggy, like individual
bristles on a bald pate. Their spring has been borrowed from summer,
for the leafage here does not begin until late in June. The whole
scenery seems to array itself for the tourist like a country wife,
with many an incompleteness in its toilet, and with a kind of haggard
apology for being late. Rough log-houses stand here and there among
the laurels. The tanned gentlemen standing about look like California
miners, as you see them in the illustrations to Bret Harte's stories.
Through this landscape, roughly blocked out, and covered still
with Nature's chips and shavings--and seeming for that very reason
singularly fresh and close to her mighty hand--we fly for twenty
miles. We are still ascending, and the true apex of our path is only
reached at the twentieth. This was the climax which poet Willis came
out to reach in a spirit of intense curiosity, intent to peer over and
see what was on the other side of the mountains, and with some idea,
as he says, of hanging his hat on the evening star. His disgust, as a
bard, when he found that the highest point was only n