n--that I would not see Baltimore again, of free will or free
agency, till I had heard the tuck of Southern drums. The most remarkable
part of the road is from Point of Rocks to Harper's Ferry, inclusive,
where the rails find a narrow space to creep between the river and the
cliffs of Catoctin and Elk Mountains. The last-named spot is especially
picturesque, standing on a promontory washed on either side by the
Potomac and Shenandoah, with all the natural advantages of abrupt rocks,
feathery hanging woods, and broken water. Thenceforward there is little
to interest or to compensate for the sluggishness of pace and frequency
of delays. The track winds on always through the same monotony of forest
and hill, plunging into the gorges and climbing the shoulders of bluffs,
with the audacity of gradient and contempt of curve that marks the
handiwork of American engineers. I wonder that one of these did not take
Mount Cenis in hand, and save the monster tunnel. The line was strongly
picketed; everywhere you saw the same fringe of murky-white tents, and
at every station the same groups of squalid soldiery.

What especially exasperated _me_ was, the incessant and continuous
neighborhood of the Potomac. If you left it for a few minutes you were
certain to come upon it again before the eye had time to forget the
everlasting foam-splashed ochre of the sullen current, and at each fresh
point it met you undiminished in volume, unabated in turbulency. Long
before this I had begun to look at the river in the light of a personal
enemy. I think that Xerxes, in the matter of the Hellespont, did wisely
and well. Did I possess his resources of men and money, I would fain do
so and more likewise to that same Potomac, subdividing its waters till
the pet spaniel of "my Mary Jane" should ford them without wetting the
silky fringes of her trailing ears.

Theoretically, a road passing through leagues of forest-clad hills ought
to be pleasant, if not interesting; practically, you are bored to death
before you get half way through. There is a remarkable scarcity of
anything like fine-grown, timber; the underwood is luxuriant enough,
especially where the mountain laurel abounds; but in ten thousand acres
of stunted firwood, you would look in vain for any one tree fit to
compare with the gray giants that watch over Norwegian fiords, or fit to
rank in "the shadowy army of the Unterwalden pines."

We reached Cumberland shortly after sundown; my first v