sunk by
explorers, for a distance of perhaps fifty feet; at one time, a level
tunnel connected the bottom of this shaft with the side of the cone,
but it has been mostly obliterated. A score of years ago, tunnel and
shaft were utilized as the leading attractions of a beer garden--to
such base uses may a great historical landmark descend!

Dickens, who apparently wrote the greater part of his _American Notes_
while suffering from dyspepsia, has a note of appreciation for the
Big Grave: "... the host of Indians who lie buried in a great mound
yonder--so old that mighty oaks and other forest trees have struck
their roots into its earth; and so high that it is a hill, even among
the hills that Nature planted around it. The very river, as though it
shared one's feelings of compassion for the extinct tribes who lived
so pleasantly here, in their blessed ignorance of white existence,
hundreds of years ago, steals out of its way to ripple near this
mound; and there are few places where the Ohio sparkles more brightly
than in the Big Grave Creek."

There is a sharp bend in the river, just below Moundsville, with
Dillon's Bottom stretching long and wide at the apex on the Ohio
shore--flat green fields, dotted with little white farmsteads, each
set low in its apple grove, and a convoluted wall of dark hills
hemming them in along the northern horizon. Then below this comes
Round Bottom, its counterpart on the West Virginia side, and coursing
through it a pretty meadow creek, Butler's Run.

Writes Washington, in 1781, to a correspondent who is thinking of
renting lands in this region: "I have a small tract called the round
bottom containing about 600 Acres, which would also let. It lyes on
the Ohio, opposite to pipe Creek, and a little above Capteening."
Across the half mile of river are the little levels and great slopes
of the Ohio hills, through which breaks this same Pipe Creek; and
hereabout Cresap's band murdered a number of inoffensive Shawanese,
a tragedy which was one of the inciting causes of Lord Dunmore's War
(1774).

We crossed over into Ohio, and pulled up on the gravelly spit at the
mouth of Pipe. While the others were botanizing high on the mountain
side, I went along a beach path toward a group of whitewashed cabins,
intent on replenishing the canteen. Upon opening the gate of one of
them, two grizzly dogs came bounding out, threatening to test the
strength of my corduroy trousers. The proprietor cautiously pee