By these combinations, from one to three words per minute are telegraphed. The operator slowly reads the distant signal to you: "Two— hundred— Rebel— cavalry— riding— out— of— Charlestown— this— way— field-piece— on—road," and it occupies five minutes. Five miles is an easy distance to communicate, but messages can be sent twenty miles. The Signal-Corps keep on the front; their services are of great value. Several of the members have been wounded and some killed.
Beautiful View from Maryland Hights.
You are on the highest point of the Blue Ridge, four thousand feet above the sea, one thousand above the Potomac.
Along the path by which you came, climbs a pony; on the pony's back a negro; on the negro's head a bucket of water; then a mule, bearing a coffee-sack, containing at each end a keg of water. Thus all provisions are brought up. Here, in the early morning, you could only look out upon a cold, shoreless sea of white fog. Now, you look down upon all the country within a radius of twenty miles, as you would gaze into your garden from your own house-top.
You see the Potomac winding far away in a thread of silver, broken by shrubs, rocks, and islands. At your feet lies Pleasant Valley, a great furrow—two miles across, from edge to edge—plowed through the mountains. It is full of camps, white villages of tents, and black groups of guns. You see cozy dwellings, with great, well-filled barns, red brick mills, straw-colored fields dotted with shocks of corn and reaching far up into the dark, hill-side woods, green sward-fields, mottled with orchards, and a little shining stream. A dim haze rests upon the mountain-guarded picture, and the soft wind seems to sing with Whittier:
"Yet calm and patient Nature keeps Her ancient promise well, Though o'er her bloom and greenness sweeps The battle's breath of hell.
"And still she walks in golden hours Through harvest-happy farms, And still she wears her fruits and flowers, Like jewels on her arms.
"Still in the cannon's pause we hear Her sweet thanksgiving psalm; Too near to God for doubt or fear, She shares the eternal calm.
"She sees with clearer eye than ours The good of suffering born,— The hearts that blossom like her flowers, And ripen like her corn."