Point; when one thinks of the snow
glittering on the Rocky Mountain wall, back of Denver; of sleepy little
towns drowsing in the sun beside the Mississippi; of Charles W. Eliot of
Cambridge, and Hy Gill of Seattle; of Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York and
Tom Watson of Georgia; of General Leonard Wood and Colonel William
Jennings Bryan; of ex-slaves living in their cabins behind Virginia
manor houses, and Filipino and Kanaka fishermen living in villages
built on stilts beside the bayous below New Orleans; of the dry salt
desert of Utah, and two great rivers meeting between green rocky hills,
at Harper's Ferry; of men working in offices at the top of the Woolworth
Building in New York, and other men working thousands of feet below the
ground, in the copper mines of Butte and the iron and coal mines of
Birmingham--when one thinks of these things one quickly ceases to fear
that the United States is standardized, and instead begins to fear that
few Americans will ever know the varied wonder of their country, and the
varied character of its inhabitants, their problems, hopes, and views.

If I lived somewhere in the region of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia
and wished quickly to learn whether the country were really standardized
or not, I should get into my automobile--or into some one else's--and
take an autumn tour through Baltimore, past Doughoregan Manor, some
miles to the west of Baltimore, on to Frederick, Maryland (where they
dispute, quite justly, I believe, the truth of the Barbara Frietchie
legend), and thence "over the mountain wall" and down into the
northeastern corner of the most irregularly shaped State in the Union,
West Virginia. I should strike for Harper's Ferry, and from there run to
Charles Town, a few miles distant (where John Brown was tried and
executed for the Harper's Ferry raid), and after circulating about that
corner of the State, I should go down into Virginia by the good highway
which leads from Charles Town to Berryville--"Bur'v'l," they pronounce
it--and to "Winchester twenty miles away" (where they say that
Sheridan's Ride was nothing to make such a lot of talk about!), and then
back, by way of Berryville, and over the Blue Ridge Mountains into the
great fox-hunting counties of Virginia: Clark, Loudon, and Fauquier.
Here I should see a hunt meet or a race meet. There are many other
places to which I might go after that, but as I meant only to suggest an
easy little tour, I shall stop at this poi