nt, contenting myself with
saying that not far to the south is Charlottesville, where Jefferson
built that most beautiful of all universities, the University of
Virginia, and his wonderful house Monticello; that Staunton (pronounced
as without the "u"), where Woodrow Wilson was born, lies west of
Charlottesville, while Fredericksburg, where Washington's mother lived,
lies to the northeast.

Some such trip as this I should take instead of a conventional New
England tour. And before starting I should buy a copy of Louise Closser
Hale's delightful book, "Into the Old Dominion."

One beauty of the trip that I suggest is that it isn't all the same. In
one place you get a fair country hotel, in another an inn, and somewhere
along the way you may have to spend a night in a private house. Also,
though the roads through Maryland, and the part of West Virginia I speak
of, are generally good, my experience of Virginia roads, especially
through the mountains, leads me to conclude that in respect to highways
Virginia remains a backward State. But who wants to ride always over
oiled roads, always to hotels with marble lobbies, or big white porches
full of hungry-eyed young women, and old ladies, knitting? Only the
standardized tourist. And I am not addressing him.

I am talking to the motorist who is not ossified in habit, who has a
love of strangeness and the picturesque--not only in scenery but in
houses and people and the kind of life those people lead. For it is
quite true that, as Professor Roland C. Usher said in his "Pan
Americanism," "the information in New York about Buenos Aires is more
extended, accurate, and contemporaneous than the notions in Maine about
Alabama.... Isolation is more a matter of time than of space, and common
interests are due to the ease of transportation and communication more
often than geographical location."

CHAPTER X

HARPER'S FERRY AND JOHN BROWN

Mad Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
With his eighteen other crazy men, went in and took the town.

--EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.

Three States meet at Harper's Ferry, and the line dividing two of them
is indicated where it crosses the station platform. If you alight at the
rear end of the train, you are in Maryland; at the front, you are in
West Virginia. This I like. I have always liked important but invisible
boundaries--boundaries of states or, better yet, of countries. When I
cross them I am disposed to s