ghter, had shared his
pleasures and acquired his fondness for such of them as were within
feminine reach. Any ordinary man would have been perfectly satisfied
with such company and delights; but no, when the bass began to leap and
the salmon to flash their tails, the pressure was too great. His friends
the Doctor and the Professor were written to, and summoned to his find.
They came, the secret was too good to keep, and that is the way this
chronicle of their doings happens to be written.

No sooner was the invitation received than the Doctor eased his
conscience and delighted his patients by the regular professional
subterfuge of sending such of them as had money to the sea-shore, and
telling those who had not that they needed no medicine at present; the
Professor turned his classes over to an assistant on pretext of a sudden
bronchial attack, for which a dose of mountain-air was the prescribed
remedy. And so the two were whirled away on the Chesapeake and Ohio
Railroad across the renowned valley of Virginia and the eastern valley
steps of the Alleghany summits, past the gigantic basins where boil and
bubble springs curative of all human ills, down the wild boulder-tossed
waters and magnificent canons of New River, around mountain-bases,
through tunnels, and out into the broad, beautiful fertility of the
Kanawha Valley, until the spires of Charleston revealed the last stage
of their railroad journey. When their train stopped, stalwart porters
relieved them of their baggage and deafened them with self-introductions
in stentorian tones: "Yere's your Hale House porter!" "I's de man fer
St. Albert's!"

"It's no wonder," said the Doctor, as he followed the sable guide from
the station to the river ferry, and looked across the Kanawha's busy
flow, covered with coal-barges, steamboats, and lumber-crafts, to
Charleston's long stretch of high-bank river front, "that Western rivers
get mad and rise against the deliberate insult of all the towns and
cities turning their backs to them. There is a mile of open front,
showing the cheerful faces of fine residences through handsome
shade-trees and over well-kept lawns; but here, where our ferry lands,
and where we see the city proper, stoops and kitchens, stove-pipes and
stairways, ash-piles and garbage-shoots, are stuck out in contempt of
the river's charms and the city's comeliness."

"Stove-pipes and stairways have to be put somewhere," said the
matter-of-fact Professor. "And th