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which paralyze industry would cease; every wheel of production would be set in motion; demand would keep pace with supply, and supply with demand; trade would increase in every direction, and wealth augment on every hand.

THE CREST OF THE ALLEGHANIES.

EDWARD STRAHAN.

[We have already given some passages descriptive of American scenery. It seems advisable to add to these some of the many eloquent descriptive articles in which the more striking of American scenes have been delineated. Though this country cannot vie with Europe in its relics of ancient civilization or in its treasures of art, yet in so far as the works of nature are concerned it holds an equal rank with the most picturesque regions of the earth, and the American who goes abroad in search of natural scenery before he has made himself familiar with the charms of his own country is in a degree untrue to the claims upon him of his native land.]

AN old writer who dearly loved excursions, Francis Rabelais, inserted in one of his fables an account of a country where the roads were in motion. He called the place the Island of Odes, from the Greek ódós, a “road,” and explained: "For the roads travel, like animated. things; and some are wandering roads, like planets, others passing roads, crossing roads, connecting roads. And I saw how the travellers, messengers, and inhabitants of the land asked, 'Where does this road go to? and that? They were answered, From the south to Faverolles, to the parish, to the city, to the river. Then, hoisting themselves on the proper road, without being otherwise troubled or fatigued, they found themselves at their place of destination."

This fancy sketch, thrown off by an inveterate joker three hundred years ago, is justified curiously by any of our modern railways; but to see the picture represented in startling accuracy you should find some busy "junction" among the coal-mountains. Here you may observe, from your perch upon the hill, an assemblage of roads actively reticulating and radiating, winding through the valleys, slinking off misanthropically into a tunnel, or gayly parading away elbow in elbow with the streams. These

avenues, upon minute inspection, are seen to be obviously moving: they are crawling and creeping with an unbroken joint-work of black wagons, the rails hidden by their moving pavement, and the road throughout advancing, foot by foot, into the distance. It is hardly too fanciful-on seeing its covering slide away, its switches swinging, its turn-tables revolving, its drawbridges opening to declare that such a road is an animal,—an animal proving its nature, according to Aristotle, by the power to move itself. Nor is it at all censurable to ask a road like this where it " goes to."

The notion of what Rabelais calls a "wayfaring way," a 'chemin cheminant, came into our thoughts at Cumberland. But Cumberland was not reached until after many miles of interesting travel along a route remarkable for beauties, both natural and improved. A coal-distributor is certain, in fact, to be a road full of attractions for the tourist; for coal, that Sleeping Beauty of our era, always chooses a pretty bed in which to perform its slumber of ages. The road which delivers the Cumberland coal, however, is truly exceptional for splendor of scenery, as well as for historical suggestiveness and engineering science. It has recently become, by means of certain lavish providences established for the blessing of travellers at every turn, a tourist route and a holiday delight.

It is all very well for the traveller of the nineteenth century to protest against the artificial and unromantic guidance of the railway: he will find, after a little experience, that the homes of true romance are discovered for him by the locomotive; that solitudes and recesses which he would never find after years of plodding in sandal shoon are silently opened to him by the engineer; and that Timon now, secking the profoundest cave in the fissures of the earth, reaches it in a Pullman car. . . .

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By day, Cumberland is quite given over to carbon; drawing her supplies from the neighboring mining-town of Frostburg, she dedicates herself devoutly to coals. All day long she may be seen winding around her sooty neck, like an African queen, endless chains and trains and rosaries of black diamonds, which never tire of passing through the enumeration of her jewelled fingers. night the scene is more beautiful. We clambered up the nearest hill at sunset, while the colored light was draining into the pass of Wills' Mountain as into a vase, and the lamps of the town sprang gradually into sight beneath us. The surrounding theatre of mountains had a singularly calm and noble air, recalling the most enchanted days of Rome and the Campagna. The curves of the hills are marvels of swaying grace, depending from point to point with the elegance of draperies, and seating the village like a gem in the 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 crab-apple 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

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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 feet above the tide.

The interest of the staircase we have run up depends greatly on its pioneer character. No mountain-chain had been crossed by a locomotive before the Alleghanies were outraged, as we see them, here and by this track. As the railroad we follow was the first to take existence in this country, excepting some short mining roads, so the grade here used was the first of equal steepness, saving on some English roads of inferior length and no mountainous prestige. Here the engineer, like Van Amburgh in the lion's den, first planted his conqueror's foot upon the mane of the wilderness; and in this spot modern science first claimed the right to reapply that grand word of a French monarch, "Il n'y a plus de Pyrénées !"

We are on the crest of the Alleghanies. On either side of the mountain-pass we have threaded rise the higher summits of the range; but, though we seem from the configuration of the land to be in a valley, we are met at every turn by the indications familiar to mountain-tops,— indications that are not without a special desolation and pathos. Though all is green with summer, we can see that the vegetation has had a dolorous struggle for existence, and that the triumph of certain sparse trees here and there is but the survival of the strongest. They stand scattered and scraggy, like individual bristles on a bald pate. Their spring has been borrowed from summer, for the leafage here does not begin until late in June. The whole scenery seems to array itself for the tourist like a country wife, with many an incompleteness in its toilet, and with a kind of haggard apology for being late. Rough log houses stand here and there among the laurels. The tanned gentlemen standing about look like California

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