rt--by which name
I designate the inevitable sledge which spares the grand and pulverizes
the little--has built a road around the Quaker City. It is a very
curious road, going by two hypothenuses of about fifteen miles to make a
base of three or four, so that we lose an hour on the way to the
Capital, all because of Philadelphia's overnight toil.

The bridge at Perryville will be one of the staunchest upon our
continent: the forts around Baltimore make the outlying landscapes
scarcely recognizable to the returning Maryland Rebels. At last,--woe be
the necessity! we have garrisoned our cities. The Relay House is the
most picturesque spot between the two foci of the country. Wandering
through the woods, I see the dirty blouses of the remnant of "the boys"
and the old abatis on the height looks sunburnt and rusty; away through
the gorge thunders the Baltimore and Ohio train, over what ruins and
resurrections, torn up a hundred times, and as obstinately relaid, until
all its engineers are veteran officers, and can stand fire both of the
furnace and the musket. Everybody in the country is a veteran; the
contractor, who ran his schooner of fodder past the Rebel batteries; the
correspondent, whose lean horse slipped through the crevices of dropping
shells; the teamster, who whipped his mule out of the mud-hole, while
his ammunition wagon behind grew hot with the heaviness of battle; the
old farmer, who took to his cellar while the fight raged in his
chimneys, but ventured out between the bayonet charges to secure his
fatted calf.

Annapolis Junction has still the sterile guise of the campaign, where
the hills are bare around the hospitals, and the railway taverns are
whittled to skeletons. I have really seen whole houses, little more than
shells, reduced to meagreness by the pocket-knife. The name of almost
everybody on the continent is cut somewhere in the South; Virginia has
more than enough names carved over her fireside altars to inscribe upon
all her multitudinous graves.

There are close to the city fine bits of landscape, where the fields dip
gracefully into fertile basins, and rise in swells of tilled fields and
orchard to some knoll, enthroning a porticoed home. Two years ago all
these fields were quagmires, where stranded wheels and the carcasses of
hybrids, looked as if a mud-geyser had opened near by. The grass has
spread its covering, as the birds spread their leaves over the poor
babes in the wood, and we walk