ross the Susquehanna. I saw
at the Washington Navy Yard the blackened body of Ellsworth, manipulated
by the surgeons. I moved through the city with McClellan's onward army
toward the transports which were to carry it to the Peninsula. The awful
tidings of the seven days' retreat came first through the Capital in my
haversack, and before Stonewall Jackson fell upon the flank of Pope, I
crossed the Long Bridge with the story of the disaster of Cedar
Mountain. In like manner the crowning glory of Five Forks made me its
earliest emissary, and the murder of the President brought me hot from
Richmond to participate in the pursuit of Booth and chronicle his
midnight expiation.

Again am I on the way to the city of centralization, to paint by
electricity the closing scenes of the conspirators, and, as I pass the
Pennsylvania line, the recollection of those frequent pilgrimages--pray
God this be the last!--comes upon me like the sequences of delirium.

As I look abroad upon the thrifty fields and the rich glebe of the
ploughman, I wonder if the revolutions of peace are not as sweeping and
sudden as those of war. He who wrote the certain downfall of this
Nation, did not keep his eye upon the steadily ascending dome of the
capitol, nor remark, during the thunders of Gettysburg, the as energetic
stroke of the pile-drivers upon the piers of the great Susquehanna
bridge. We built while we desolated. No fatalist convert to Mohammed had
so sure faith in the eternity of his institutions. More masonry has been
laid along the border during the war than in any five previous years. We
have finished the Treasury, raised the bronze gates on the Capitol,
double-railed all the roads between New York and the Potomac, and gone
on as if architecture were imperishable, while thrice the Rebels swept
down toward the Relay.

And we have done one strategic thing, which, I think, will compare with
the passing of Vicksburg or the raid of Sherman; we have turned
Philadelphia.

This modern Pompeii used to be the stumbling-block on the great highway.
It was to the direct Washington route what Hell-gate was to the Sound
Channel. We were forbidden the right of way through it, on the ground
that by retarding travel Philadelphia would gain trade, and had to cross
the Delaware on a scow, or lay up in some inn over night. New Jerseymen,
I hear, pray every morning for their daily stranger; Philadelphia has
much sinned to entrap its daily customer. But Maillefe