URE.

The Natural Bridge has long been thought one of the great curiosities
of our country. It is in Virginia, and the county in which it is
situated is called Rockbridge County.

The traveler is riding in a stage on a wild road in the mountains. The
road grows narrow. Soon it is a mere lane, with high board fences and
small trees on each side. But the traveler sees nothing to show him
that he is on the wonderful Natural Bridge.

[Illustration: The Natural Bridge.]

The bridge that he is driving over is about forty feet thick, and of
solid rock. If he should go to the other side of the board fence, he
could look down into a ravine more than two hundred feet deep.

When the traveler goes down into the ravine, he looks up at the
beautiful curve of this great bridge of rock. The bridge is nearly one
hundred and seventy-five feet above his head.

Many years ago, when the writer of this book was a boy, he stood in the
dark chasm underneath this bridge and looked up at the great bridge of
rock above. He took a stone, as all other visitors do, and tried to
throw it so as to hit the arch of the bridge above. But the stone
stopped before it got halfway up, and fell back, resounding on the
rocks below. Then he was told the old story, that nobody had ever
thrown to the arch except George Washington, who had thrown a silver
dollar clear to the center of the bridge.

There were names scribbled all over the rocks. People are always trying
to write their own names in such strange places as this. Above all the
other names were two rows of mere scratches. If they had ever been
names, they were too much dimmed to be read by a person standing on the
rocks below. The lower of these two high names, the people said, was
the name of Washington. It was said that when he was a young man, he
climbed higher than any one else to scratch his name on the rock. And
the name above his, they said, was the name of a young man who had had
a strange adventure in trying to write his name above that of the
father of his country.

The story of this young man's climbing up the rocks used to appear in
the old schoolbooks. It was told with so many romantic additions, that
it was hard to believe.

The writer afterwards learned that the main fact of the story was true,
and, that the hero of the story was still living in Virginia.

This foolhardy boy, whose name was Pepper, climbed up the rock to write
his name above the rest. Pepper climbed up by ho