satisfactory victory, was for the South a conclusive lesson. The
Peter-the-Hermit excursion into Maryland lasted just two weeks, and
its failure was signal and instructive. Intended as an invasion that
should result in the occupation of Washington and Philadelphia, it led
to nothing but to Stuart's audacious raid into Pennsylvania with his
thousand troopers--a theatrical flourish to wind up an unsuccessful
drama. As for Harper's Ferry, its overwhelming punishment and
precipitate conquest were not without their use: the retention by
the Federals of the little depot of army stores on the Virginia bank
surprised and thwarted Lee. To reduce it, he had to pause, and ere the
operation was complete McClellan was upon him, and cornered him before
he was enabled to take up a firm position in Western Maryland and
prepare for the Pennsylvania invasion. The Ferry fell into our hands
again, but as a ruin. As for the elaborate bridge approaching it, its
history is the history of the Potomac campaign: three times has it
been destroyed by the Confederates, and twice by the Unionists. Eight
times it has been carried away by freshets.

An earlier interest, yet intimately connected with the rebellion,
belongs to Harper's Ferry. From the car window you see the old
engine-house where John Brown fortified himself, and was wounded and
captured, while these wooded hills were bathed with October red in
1859. The breaches in the walls where he stood his siege are still
apparent, filled in with new brickwork. No single life could have been
so effectually paid out as his was, for he cemented in the cause of
the North the whole abolition sentiment of the civilized world, and
gained our army unnumbered recruits. Truly said the slaves when he
died, "Massa Brown is not buried: he is planted."

Of the site of all these storied ruins we can only say again and again
that it is beautiful. The rocky steeps that enclose the town have
a Scottish air, and traveled visitors, beholding them, are fain
to allude to the Trosachs; but the river that rolls through the
mountains, and has whirled them into a hollow as the potter turns
a vase, is continental in its character, and plunges through the
landscape with a swell of eddy and a breadth of muscle that are like
nothing amid the basking Scottish waters.

On an eminence immediately overlooking Harper's Ferry, and some four
hundred feet thereabove, is the enormous turtle-shaped rock, curiously
blocked up over a f