xt
great departure, his entrance into another widening circle of thinking.
He had never seen a mountain before; and the wild, plunging ride among
the Alleghany Mountains was magnificent. He sat for hours at a time
looking out of the window, while the train, drawn by its two tremendous
engines, crawled toward the summit. He saw the river drop deeper and
deeper, and get whiter and wilder; and then came the wooded level of
the summit, and then began the descent.

While the reeling train alternately flung him to the window and against
the seat, he gazed out at the wheeling peaks, the snow-laden pines, and
the mighty gorges, through which the icy river ran, green as grass in
its quiet eddies. On every side were wild hillsides meshed with fallen
trees, and each new vista contained its distant peak. It was the
realization of his imagination of the Alleghanies.

As the train swooped round its curves, dropping lower and lower, the
valley broadened out, and the great mountains moved away into ampler
distances. The river ran in a wide and sinuous band to the east and the
south. He realized it to be the Potomac, whose very name is history. He
began to look ahead to seeing Harper's Ferry, and in the nearing
distance was Washington!

He had the Western man's intensity of feeling for Washington. To him it
was the centre of American life, because he supposed the laws were made
there. The Western man knows Boston as the centre of art, which he
affects to despise, and New York appeals to him as the home of the
millionaire, of the money-lender; but in Washington he recognizes the
great nerve centre of national life. It is the political ganglion of
the body politic. It appeals to the romantic in him as well. It is
historical; it is the city that makes history.

Slowly the night fell. After leaving Harper's Ferry the outside world
vanished, and when the brakeman called "Washington," it was nearly
eight o'clock of a damp, chilly night. He was so eager to see the
Capitol, which the kindly fat man behind him had assured him was but a
few steps away from the station, that he took his valise in his hand,
and started directly for the dome, which a darkey with a push-cart,
pointed out to him with oppressive courtesy.

There was an all-pervasive, impalpable, blue-gray mist in the air, cold
and translucent; and when he came to the foot of the grounds, and faced
the western front of the Capitol building, he drew a deep breath of
delight. It thr