"Certainly; with pleasure. You stop in Baltimore long?"
"I don't know," I replied.
"You have been there before, I suppose?"
"Oh, no; never. I have been nowhere outside of Virginia and North Carolina. Most of my traveling before my marriage was in going to and from Lynchburg, where I was at school.
"Once I rode on horseback to the Peaks of Otter, which are among the highest mountains of the South. You can't imagine how glorious it was to be up there so far away from the earth. When I first looked down from their lofty heights the sky and the earth seemed to be touching, and presently the rain began to pour. I could see the glimmering, glittering drops, but could not hear them fall. I was above the clouds and the rain, up in the sunshine and stillness, the only audible sound being a strange flapping of wings as the hawks and buzzards flew by. Suddenly the rain ceased, the haze vanished and I saw below the rugged mountains the level country that looked like a vast ocean in the distance.
"The words of John Randolph echoed in my heart with this infinite mystery of nature. He with only a servant spent the night on those mighty rocks and in the morning as he was watching the glory of the sunrise he pointed upward with his long slender hand and, having no one else to whom to express his thought, charged his servant never from that time to believe anyone who said there was no God.
"'No, sah, Marse John; no sah,' said the awe-stricken servant. 'I ain't gwine to, sah. I ain't gwine to let none of Marse Thomas Didymuses' temptatious bedoutin' tricks cotch no holt of my understands of de Lord.'
"Once, too, I——"
"You have relatives in Baltimore?" said the gentleman, abruptly interrupting me; otherwise, feeling that geography and history were safe subjects, I should have rattled on till I had told him all I knew.
"Yes, sir," I replied. "I am going to visit them."