pple of this capitalist, blandly choosing a knotty and unsalable
specimen.

Pretty soon, as we look over into Maryland, we have indicated for
us the site of old Fort Frederick, until lately traceable, but now
completely obliterated. It was an interesting relic of the old Indian
wars. Shortly after Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela, when the
Indians had become very bold, and had almost depopulated this part of
Maryland, Fort Frederick was erected by Governor Sharpe as a menace,
and garrisoned with two hundred men. It was an immediate moral
victory, awing and restraining the savages, though no decided conflict
is known to have occurred from its construction to its quiet rotting
away within the present generation. Those were the days when Frederick
in Maryland and Chambersburg in Pennsylvania were frontier points, the
Alleghanies were Pillars of Hercules, and all beyond was a blank!

Still continuing our course on the Virginia side of the Potomac,
through what is known in this State as the Virginia Valley, while in
Pennsylvania the same intervale is called the Cumberland Valley, we
admire the increasing sense of solitude, the bowery wildness of the
river-banks, and the spirited freshness of the hastening water. At a
station of delightful loneliness we alight.

Here Sir John's Run comes leaping from the hills to slide gurgling
into the Potomac, and at this point we attain Berkeley Springs by
a dragging ascent of two miles and a half in a comfortable country
stage. Sir John's Run was called after Sir John Sinclair, a
quartermaster in the doomed army of Braddock. The outlet into the
Potomac is a scene of quiet country beauty, made dignified by the
hills around the river. A hot, rustic station of two or three
rooms, an abandoned factory building--tall, empty-windowed and
haunted-looking--gone clean out for want of commerce, like a lamp for
lack of oil. Opposite the station a pretty homespun tavern trellised
with grapes, a portrait of General Lee in the sitting-room, and a fat,
buxom Virginia matron for hostess. All this quiet scene was once the
locality of the hot hopes and anxieties of genius, and it is for this
reason we linger here.

When the little harbor at the mouth of Sir John's Run was still more
wild and lonely than now, James Rumsey, a working bath-tender at
Berkeley Springs, launched upon it a boat that he had invented of
novel principle and propulsive force. The force was steam, and Rumsey
had shown his mod