midst of "great laps and folds of sculptor's work."
The mechanics and miners, as twilight deepened, began to lead their
sweethearts over these beautiful hills, so soft in outline that no
paths are necessary. The clouds of fireflies made an effect, combining
with the village lights below. Then as night deepened, as if they
were the moving principle of all the enchantment, the company's
rolling-mills, like witches' kettles, began to spirt enormous gouts
of flame, which seemed to cause their heavy roofs to flutter like the
lids of seething caldrons.

The commanding attraction of the western journey is necessarily the
passage of the Alleghanies. The climb begins at Piedmont, and follows
an ascent which in eleven consecutive miles presents the rare grade
of one hundred and sixteen feet per mile. The first tableau of real
sublimity, perhaps, occurs in following up a stream called Savage
River. The railway, like a slender spider's thread, is seen hanging at
an almost giddy height up the endless mountain-side, and curved hither
and thither in such multiplied windings that enormous arcs of it can
always be seen from the flying window of the car. The woods, green
with June or crimson with November, clamber over each other's
shoulders up the ascent; but as we attain the elevation of two
hundred feet above the Savage, their tufted tops form a soft and mossy
embroidery beneath us, diminishing in perspective far down the cleft
of the ravine. As we turn the flank of the great and stolid Backbone
Mountain we command the mouth of another stream, pouring in from the
south-west: it is a steeply-enclosed, hill-cleaving torrent, which
some lover of plays and cider, recollecting Shakespeare's Midsummer
Night's slumber beneath the crabapple boughs, has named Crabtree
Creek. There is a point where the woody gorges of both these streams
can be commanded at once by the eye, and Nature gives us few landscape
_pendants_ more primitively wild and magnificent than these.

This ascent was made by the engineers of the company in the early
days of railroads, and when no one knew at what angle the friction of
wheels upon rails would be overcome by gravity. On the trial-trip the
railroad president kept close to the door, meaning, in the case of
possible discomfiture and retrogression, to take to the woods! But all
went well, and in due time was reached, as we now reach it, Altamont,
the alpine village perched two thousand six hundred and twenty-six
fe