fortune of the writer of this article to accompany them, and a desire to bring the unrivalled attractions of this noble highway of travel to the notice of the whole traveling community of the United States, has induced him to ask a couple of pages in the Guide Book of the Messrs. Appleton for some remarks on the more striking features of the route between Baltimore and Wheeling. It is a matter of some difficulty in so short a space to make a selection of characteristics for comment. If one should seek to describe the scenery which lies along the roadway, in the style of the picturesque tourist, the thousand lovely and

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and Maryland, wherein by turns the locomotive dashes forward on its way to the Belle Riviere.

"If despairing to do justice to wood and stream and mountain, to shady covert and foaming waterfall, the writer should undertake to recall the historical associations which belong to the country through which the road is carried, he would find it necessary to pass in review a very large portion of the colonial and revolutionary history of the Anglo-American civilization, for every step is in the path of empire, and no defile of the Ridge and the Allegheny pursued by the theodolite is without some stirring

imposing views which demand commemoration would swell his monograph into a quarto volume. Now presenting the pastoral beauty of the English landscape, and now rising into the sublimity of the Grand Chartreuse, nature seems to have inspired the engineer, whose mental eye saw the possible line through this magnificently varied and wonderfully broken region, so that all who should be whirled over the iron grooves of the railway, might behold her in her grandeur and more delightful aspects, and with a generous disregard of territorial boundaries, to have divided her glories between the two States of Virginia

memory of the past. In this new land of ours, it would be difficult to find a section so clustering with the legends and recollections of another day, as the devious passage from the Chesapeake to the Ohio. Here we follow in the track of the youthful Washington and the obstinate Braddock, we pass over spots endeared to the men who commanded in later days under the Pater Patriae, and we at last reach the hunting grounds of Logan, the red man eloquent. But, if in turning from the poetical and historical suggestions of the road, the writer should essay to speak worthily of the vast skill and enterprise represented by it,

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of the difficulties that had to be surmounted in its construction, of the gigantic forces it now employs, and the immense capital it calls into requisition, he would find himself overwhelmed by a mass of facts and statistics, the proper arrangement of which would require a work of no small dimensions. A most valuable and entertaining volume has, indeed, been printed for private circulation, containing a full account of the origin, progress and completion of the road- a volume which does not yield in interest to the history of a new commonwealth.

suer makes across country in full career to intercept it again as it rolls through the beautiful meadows near the ruins of Fort Frederick, and stretches farther back towards its source, a flashing thread of silver, among the hills toward Cumberland. There are points when looking out of the window of the car the visitor fancies he must soon reach the head spring, and see the small fountain whence comes the river which is to sweep in majesty by the hallowed tomb of Mount Vernon, but the interposing mountain is turned by a graceful curve, the gorge recedes as we advance, and the bright Po

"If I were asked what made the greatest impression on my own mind in connection with the Baltimore & Ohio Railway, I should hesitate to say the singular triumph it displays of human skill over material obstacles, or the amazing order and regularity which pervade and direct all its complex operations. For the first two hundred miles. of its course the road seems to be a scientific chase after the head-waters of the Potomac River. Pursuing for some distance the brawling Patapsco, it strikes the bolder stream only to run it fairly down through the magnificent pass of Harper's Ferry, where leaving it for a time, the pur

tomac still appears in the distance prospect, leaping and laughing as before. The river seems running up stream' with astonishing celerity, and to quote the familiar line with more than ordinary appositeness, be

comes

Fine by degrees and beautifully less.

"This engineering chase grows most exciting in the narrow and tortuous ravine where the Potomac has dwindled into the Savage River, and where the road is carried off for more than fourteen miles up a continuous grade of 116 feet to the mile. The lonely grandeur of the scene at this point