and from
so many hours' severe walking, occasionally stumbled headlong, in
danger constantly of walking into the river. It became very dark,
and the mist rising from the river made the road and water all
look alike, and I had to feel my way along step by step. ** A few
miles further I heard the welcome sound of a locomotive which
served as a guide to the Newville Depot, where I arrived about
half-past eleven o'clock.[5-2]

[5-2] Our self-forgetting traveller omits to give the
distances of the remarkable journey he is pursuing. On the
morning of the 6th he left Papertown; on the evening of the
7th he parted with the troops at Altodale; and now a little
before midnight of the 8th he is at Newville--having walked
a distance which cannot be much short of NINETY MILES in
some _sixty-five hours_; carrying for more than one-half of
the distance about _one thousand letters_, whose weight
could not have been less than THIRTY POUNDS--all this
through drenching rains and over horrible roads; and
fording or swimming streams whose bridges had been swept
away by the flood!

"Learning that no train would start for Harrisburg till towards
morning, I took a room and went to bed. About one o'clock I heard
a locomotive whistle, and hastily dressing, hurried down only to
find it was a soldiers' train going to Shippensburg; _but
concluded not to go to bed again for fear I should miss the
earliest train eastward_(!) I spent the balance of the night in
an engine room of the station drying my clothes and the letters,
and took a train in the morning for Harrisburg, and thence to New
York, where I arrived about ten o'clock at night." On that night
he sorted the Brooklyn letters, and personally delivered most of
them early on the following morning!

In a second expedition undertaken for a similar benevolent
object, this resolute and indefatigable traveller recounts some
amusing tribulations which he suffered in order to secure safe
transit for a "large trunk filled with tobacco for the
boys"--worth its weight in gold to the tobacco-famished
regiments. Among other forwarding agents whose services he
appropriated was one "Nat Wolf, who had recently been emp