t many people wish to read Mr. Dreiser's books
yet no one has to read them if he does not want to. But it is a
different matter with these rivers. Sensitive citizens of Harper's Ferry
and pure-minded passengers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad are obliged
daily to witness what is going on.

Before the days of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and of the
late Anthony Comstock, when we had no one to make it clear to us exactly
what was shocking, little was thought of the public scandal between the
Potomac and the Shenandoah. Thomas Jefferson seems to have rather liked
it; there is a point above the town, known as Jefferson's Rock, at
which, it is said, the author of the Declaration of Independence stood
and uttered a sentiment about the spectacle. Everybody in Harper's Ferry
agrees that Jefferson stood at Jefferson's Rock and said something
appropriate, and any one of them will try to tell you what he said, but
each version will be different.

A young lady told me that he said: "This view is worth a trip across the
Atlantic Ocean."

A young man in a blue felt hat of the fried-egg variety said that
Jefferson declared, with his well-known simplicity: "This is the
grandest view I ever seen."

An old man who had to go through the tobacco chewer's pre-conversational
rite before replying to my question gave it as: "Pfst!--They ain't
nothin' in Europe ner Switzerland ner nowheres else, I reckon', to beat
this-here scenery."

The man at the drug store quoted differently alleging the saying to have
been: "Europe has nothing on this": whereas the livery stable man's
version was: "This has that famous German river--the Rhine River don't
they call it?--skinned to death."

Whatever Jefferson's remark was, there has been added to the spectacle
at Harper's Ferry, since his day, a new feature, which, could he have
but seen it, must have struck him forcibly, and might perhaps have
caused him to say more.

At a lofty point upon the steep wall of Maryland Heights, across the
Potomac from the town, far, far up upon the side of the cliff,
commanding a view not only of both rivers, but of their meeting place
and their joint course below, and of the lovely contours of the Blue
Ridge Mountains, fading to smoky coloring in the remote distance, there
has, of late years, appeared the outline of a gigantic face, which looks
out from its emplacement like some Teutonic god in vast effigy, its huge
luxuriant mustaches pointing East and