ings half
rural, half urban, which for loveliness can scarcely be rivaled by any
other city in the land. Sir Henry Holland, who was of the Prince of
Wales's suite, when he visited Pittsburgh, remarked to one of the
committee of reception that he had, in 1845, spent a week in an
equestrian exploration of the suburbs of Pittsburgh; that he had
traveled through all the degrees of the earth's longitude, and had not
elsewhere found any scenery so diversified, picturesque, and beautiful
as that around Pittsburgh. He likened it to a vast panorama, from which,
as he rode along, the curtain was dropping behind and rising before him,
revealing new beauties continually. "If the business portion of
Pittsburgh is a city, half enchanted, of fire and smoke, inhabited by
demons playing with fire, the surrounding portion is also under
enchantment, of a different kind, and smiles a land of beauty,
brightness, and quiet. The one section might be a picture by Tintoretto,
and the other by Claude Lorraine."

On the twenty-fourth of November, 1753, no human habitation stood on the
peninsula between the Alleghany and Monongahela Rivers. On that day
Washington recorded in his journal: "I think it extremely well situated
for a fort, as it has absolute command of both rivers." In the following
spring the English began the erection of a stockade here, which, on the
twenty-fourth of April, was surrendered to the French under Captain
Contrecoeur Who at once proceeded to the erection of Fort Du Quesne.

Round this name centres a wealth of incident, romance, and history, but
no one has risen to do it justice. Braddock's ill-starred expedition was
followed by the abandonment of the fort by the French, in November,
1758, and its subsequent rebuilding as Fort Pitt. The fate of the little
hamlet which sprang up around it was for a long time most dubious, but
its position as a frontier post on the line of the ever
westward-retreating Indians, and on the edge of the vast unknown
wilderness, just beginning to allure adventurous pioneers, kept it from
falling into the oblivion with which it was threatened by the
dismantling of the fort and the troublous Revolutionary times. Yet as
late as 1784 so experienced a man as Arthur Lee, the Virginian, who had
been a commissioner at the court of Versailles with Franklin and Deane,
and who visited this hamlet in December of this year, said of it:
"Pittsburgh is inhabited almost entirely by Scots and Irish, who live in