LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

The behavior of a great Hope is like the setting of the sun. It splashes out from under a horizontal cloud, so diabolically incandescent that you see a dozen false suns blotting the heavens with purple in every direction. You bury your eyes in a handkerchief, with your back carefully turned upon the west, and meantime the spectacle you were waiting for takes place and disappears. You promise yourself to nick it better to-morrow. The soul withdraws into its depths. The stars arise (offering two or three thousand more impracticable suns), and the night is ironical.

Having already conquered, without boasting, a certain success before the reading public, and having persuaded an author of renown to sign his name to my bantling, my Expectation and Hope have long been to surpass that trifling production. You may think it a slight thing to prepare a lucky volume, and, tapping Fame familiarly on the shoulder, engage her to undertake its colportage throughout the different countries of the globe. My first little work of travel and geography had exceeded my dreams of a good reception. It had earned me several proposals from publishers; it had been annotated with "How true!" and "Most profound!" by the readers in public libraries; its title had given an imaginative air to the ledgers of book-sellers; and it had added a new shade of moodiness to the collection of Mudie. The man who hits one success by accident is always trying to hit another by preparation. Since that achievement I have thought of nothing but the creation of another impromptu, and I have really prepared a quantity of increments toward it in the various places to which my traveling existence has led me. That I have settled down, since these many years past, at the centre and capital of ideas would prove me, even without the indiscretions of that first little book, an American by birth. I need not add that my card is printed in German text, Paul Fleming, and that time has brought to me a not ungraceful, though a sometimes practically retardating, circumference. Beneath a mask of cheerfulness, and even of obesity, however, I continue to guard the sensitive feelings of my earlier days. Yes: under this abnormal convexity are fostered, as behind a lens, the glowing tendencies of my youth. Though no longer, like the Harold described in Icelandic verse by Regner Hairy-Breeches, "a young chief proud of my flowing locks," yet I still "spend my mornings among the young maidens," or such of them as frequent the American Colony, as we call it, in Paris. I still "love to converse with the handsome widows." Miss Ashburton, who in one little passage of our youth treated me with considerable disrespect, and who afterward married a person of great lingual accomplishments, her father's late courier, at Naples, has been handsomely forgiven, but not forgotten. A few intelligent ladies, of marked listening powers and conspicuous accomplishments, are habitually met by me at their residences in the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe or at the receptions of the United States minister. These fair attractions, although occupying, in practice, a preponderating share of my time, are as nothing to me, however, in comparison with that enticing illusion, my Book.

The scientific use of the imagination in treating the places and distances of Geography is the dream of my days and the insomnia of my nights.

Every morning I take down and dust the loose sheets of my coming book or polish the gilding of my former one. It is in my fidelity to these baffling hopes—hopes fed with so many withered (or at least torn and blotted) leaves—rather than in any resemblance authenticable by a looking-glass, that I show my identity with the old long-haired and nasal Flemming.

Yet, though so long a Parisian, and so comfortable in my theoretic pursuit of Progressive Geography, my leisure hours are unconsciously given to knitting myself again to past associations, and some of my deepest pleasures come from tearing open the ancient wounds. Shall memory ever lose that sacred, that provoking day in the Vale of Lauterbrunnen when the young mechanic in green serenaded us with his guitar? It had for me that quite peculiar and personal application that it immediately preceded my rejection by Miss Mary. The Staubbach poured before our eyes, as from a hopper in the clouds, its Stream of Dust. The Ashburtons, clad in the sensible and becoming fashion of English lady-tourists, with long ringlets and Leghorn hats, sat on either side of me upon the grass. And then that implacable youth, looking full in my eye, sang his verses of insulting sagacity:

She gives thee a garland woven fair;

Take care!

It is a fool's-cap for thee to wear;

Beware! beware!

Trust her not,

She is fooling thee!

Meeting him two or three times afterward as he pursued his apprentice-tour, I felt as though I had encountered a green-worm. And I confess that it was partly on his account that I made a vow, fervently uttered and solemnly kept, never again to visit Switzerland or the Rhine. Miss Ashburton I easily forgave. The disadvantage, I distinctly felt, was hers, solely and restrictedly hers; and I should have treated with profound respect, if I had come across him, the professional traveler who was good enough to marry her afterward.

But these bitter-sweet recollections are only the relief to my studies. It is true they are importunate, but they are strictly kept below stairs.

Nor would any one, regarding the stout and comfortable Flemming, suspect what regrets and what philosophies were disputing possession of his interior. For my external arrangements, I flatter myself that I have shaped them in tolerable taste.

My choice of the French capital I need not defend to any of my American readers. To all of you this consummation is simply a matter of ability. I heartily despise, as I always did, all mere pamperings of physical convenience. Still, for some who retain some sympathy with the Paul Flemming of aforetime, it may be worth while to mention the particular physical conveniencies my soul contemns. I inhabit, and have done so for eight years at least, a neat little residence of the kind styled "between court and garden," and lying on the utmost permissible circumference of the American quarter in Paris—say on the hither side of Passy. For nearly the same period I have had in lease a comical box at Marly, whither I repair every summer. My town-quarters, having been furnished by an artist, gave me small pains. The whole interior is like a suite of rooms in the Hôtel Cluny. The only trouble was in bringing up the cellar to the quality I desired and in selecting domestics—points on which, though careless of worldly comfort in general, I own I am somewhat particular.

No gentleman valets for me—rude creatures presuming to outdress their masters. What I wanted was the Corporal Trim style of thing—bald, faithful, ancient retainer. After a world of vexation I succeeded in finding an artless couple, who agreed for a stipulation to sigh when I spoke of my grandfather before my guests, and to have been brought up in the family.

But I am wandering, and neglecting the true vein of sentiment which so abounds in my heart. All my pleasure is still in mournful contemplation, but I have learned that the feelings are most refined when freed from low cares and personal discomforts. I was going to cite a letter I wrote to my oldest friend, the baron of Hohenfels. It was sketched out first in verse, but in that form was a failure:

"15th MARCH.

"The snow-white clouds beyond my window are piled up like Alps. The shades of B. Franklin and W. Tell seem to walk together on those Elysian Fields; for it was here (or sufficiently nigh for the purpose) that in days gone by our pure patriot dwelt and flirted with Madame Helvetius; and yonder clouds so much resemble the snowy Alps that they remind me irresistibly of the Swiss. Noble examples of a high purpose and a fixed will! Do B. and W. not move, Hyperion-like, on high? Were they not, likewise, sons of Heaven and Earth?

"I wish I knew the man who called flowers 'the fugitive poetry of Nature.' That was a sweet carol, which I think I have quoted to you, sung by the Rhodian children of old in spring, bearing in their hands a swallow, and chanting 'The swallow is come,' with some other lines, which I have forgotten. A pretty carol is that, too, which the Hungarian boys, on the islands of the Danube, sing to the returning stork in spring, what time it builds its nests in the chimneys and gracefully diverts the draft of smoke into the interior. What a thrill of delight in spring-time! What a joy in being and moving! Some housekeepers might object to that, and say that there was but imperfect joy in moving; but I am about to propose to you, as soon as I have taken a little more string, a plan of removal that will suit both us and the season. My friend, the time of storms is flying before the pretty child called April, who pursues it with his blooming thyrsus. Breathing scent upon the air, he has already awakened some of the trees on the boulevards, and the white locust-blossoms in the garden of Rossini are beginning to hang out their bunches to attract the nightingales. He calls to the swallows, and they arrive in clouds.

"He knocks at the hard envelope of the chrysalis, which accordingly prepares to take its chance for a precarious metamorphosis—into the wings of the butterfly or into the bosom of the bird. How very sweet!

"Strange is the lesson, my friend, which humanity teaches itself from the larva. Even so do I, methinks, feed in life's autumn upon the fading foliage of Hope, and, still feeding and weaving, turn it at last into a little grave. A neat image that, which, by the by, I stole from Drummond of Hawthornden. Do you recollect his verse?—but of course I should be provoked if I thought you did—

For, with strange thoughts possessed,

I feed on fading leaves

Of hope—which me deceives,

And thousand webs doth warp within my breast.

And thus, in end, unto myself I weave

A fast-shut prison. No! but even a Grave!

"To pursue my subject: April, having thus balanced the affairs of the bird and the worm, proceeds to lay over the meadows a tablecloth for the bees. He opens all the windows of Paris, and on the streets shows us the sap mounting in carnation in the faces of the girls.

"My dear Hohenfels, I invite you to the festival which Spring is spreading just now in the village of Marly. My cabin will be gratified to open in your honor. May it keep you until autumn! Come, and come at once."

Having signed my missive, I tucked it into an envelope, which I blazoned with my favorite seal, the lyre of Hyperion broken, and rang for Charles. In his stead, in lieu of my faithful Charles, it was Hohenfels himself who entered, fresh from the Hôtel Mirabeau.

"Look alive, man! Can you lend me an umbrella?" said he briskly.

I looked out at the window: it was snowing.

The moment seemed inopportune for the delivery of my epistle: I endeavored to conceal it—without hypocrisy and by a natural movement—under the usual pile of manuscript on my table devoted to Progressive Geography. But the baron had spied his name on the address: "How is that? You were writing to me? There, I will spare you the trouble of posting."

He read my sentences, turning at the end of each period to look out at the snow, which was heavily settling in large damp flakes. He said nothing at first about the discrepancy, but only looked forth alternately with his reading, which was pointed enough. I said long ago that the beauty of Hohenfels' character, like that of the precious opal, was owing to a defect in his organization. The baron retains his girlish expression, his blue eye, and his light hair of the kind that never turns gray: he is still slender, but much bent. He went over to the fireplace and crouched before the coals that were flickering there still. Then he said, with that gentle, half-laughing voice, "Take care, Paul, old boy! Children who show sense too early never grow, they say: by parity of argument, men who are poetical too late in life never get their senses."

"I have given up poetry," said I, "and you cannot scan that communication in your hand."

"But it is something worse than poetry! It is prose inflated and puffed and bubbled. You are falling into your old moony ways again, and sonneteering in plain English. Are you not ashamed, at your age?"

"What age do you mean? I feel no infirmities of age. If my hair is gray, 'tis not with years, as By—"

"If your hair is gray, it is because you are forty-eight, my old beauty."

"Forty-five!" I said, with some little natural heat.

"Forty-five let it be, though you have said so these three years. And what age is that to go running after the foot of the rainbow? Here you are, my dear Flemming, breathing forth hymns to Spring, and inviting your friends to picnics! Don't you know that April is the traitor among the twelve months of the year? You are ready to strike for Marly in a linen coat and slippers! Have you forgotten, my poor fellow, that Marly is windy and raw, and that Louis XIV. caught that chill at Marly of which he died? Ah, Paul, you are right enough. You are young, still young. You are not forty-eight: you are sixteen—sixteen for the third time."

Hohenfels, whose once fine temper is going a little, stirred the fire and suddenly rose.

"Lend me an umbrella!" he repeated imperatively.

"Are you in such a hurry to go? That is not very complimentary to me," I observed. "Have you done scolding me?"

What is called by some my growing worldliness teaches me to value dryness in an old friend as I value dryness in a fine, cobwebbed, crusty wine. It is from the merest Sybaritism that I surround myself with comrades who, like Hohenfels, can fit their knobs into my pattern, and receive my knobs in their own vacancy. My hint brought him over at once into the leathern chair opposite the one I occupy.

"Paul, Paul," he said, "I only criticise you for your good. What have you done with your three adolescences? You are getting stout, yet you still write poetically. You have some wit, imagination, learning and aptitude. You might make a name in science or art, but everything you do lacks substance, because you live only in your old eternal catchwords of the Past and the Future. You can sketch and paint, yet have never exhibited your pictures except in ladies' albums. You profess to love botany, yet your sole herbarium has been the mignonette in sewing-girls' windows. You are inoffensive, you are possessed of a competency, but in everything, in every vocation, you rest in the state of amateur—amateur housekeeper, amateur artist, amateur traveler, amateur geographer. And such a geographer as you might be, with your taste for travel and the Hakluyt Society's publications you have pored over for years!"

This chance allusion to my grand secret took me from my guard. Hohenfels, blundering up and down in search of something to anathematize, had stumbled upon the very fortress of my strength. I deemed it time to let him into a part of my reserved intellectual treasure—to whirl away a part at least of the sand in which my patient sphinx had been buried.

"I have indeed been a reader," I said modestly. "When a youth at Heidelberg, I perused, with more profit than would be immediately guessed from the titles, such works as the Helden-Buchs and the Nibelungen-Lieds, the Saxon Rhyme-Chronicles, the poems of Minnesingers and Mastersingers, and Ships of Fools, and Reynard Foxes, and Death-Dances, and Lamentations of Damned Souls. My study since then has been in German chemistry from its renaissance in Paracelsus, and physical science, including both medicine and the evolution of life. Shall I give you a few dozen of my favorite writers?"

"Quite unnecessary," said the baron with some haste. "But I fancied you were going to speak of geographical authors."

"Are you fond of such writings yourself?" I asked.

"Immensely—that is, not too scientific, you know," said the baron, who was out of his element here. "Bayard Taylor, now, or some such fellows as the Alpine Club."

"My dear baron, the republications by the Hakluyt Society are but a small part of the references I have taken down for my Progressive Geography. You admire Switzerland?"

"Vastly. Steep jump, the Staubbach."

"But the Alps are only hillocks compared with the Andes of Peru, with the Cordilleras, with Chimborazo! Ah, baron, Chimborazo! Well, my dear boy, the system I elaborate makes it a matter of simple progression and calculation to arrive at mountains much more considerable still."

"Such as—?"

"The Mountains of the Moon!"

I then, in a few dexterously involved sentences, allowed the plan of my newly-invented theory to appear—so much of it, that is, as would leave Hohenfels completely in the dark, and detract in no wise from the splendor of my Opus when it should be published. As science, however, truly considered, is the art of dilapidating and merging into confused ruin the theories of your predecessors, I was somewhat more precise with the destructive than the constructive part of my plan.

"Geographical Science, I am prepared to show, is that which modern learning alone has neglected, to the point of leaving its discoveries stationary. It is not so with the more assiduously cultivated branches. What change, what advance, in every other department of culture! In geology, the ammonite of to-day was for Chalmers a parody facetiously made by Nature in imitation of her living conchology, and for Voltaire a pilgrim's cockle dropped in the passes of the Alps. In medicine, what progress has been made since ague was compared to the flutter of insects among the nerves, and good Mistress Dorothy Burton, who died but in 1629, cured it by hanging a spider round the patient's neck "in a nutshell lapped in silk"! In chemistry, what strides! In astronomy, what perturbations and changes! In history, what do we not owe to the amiable authors who, dipping their pens in whitewash, have reversed the judgments of ages on Nero and Henry VIII.! In genealogy, what thanks must we pay to Darwin! Geographical Science alone, stolid in its insolent fixity, has not moved: the location of Thebes and Memphis is what it was in the days of Cheops and Rameses. And so poor in intellect are our professors of geodesic lore that London continues to be, just as it always was, in latitude 51° 30' 48" N., longitude 0° 5' 38" W., while the observatory of Paris contentedly sits in latitude 48° 50' 12" N. and longitude 2° 20' 22-1/2" E. from the observatory of Greenwich! This disgracefully stationary condition of the science cannot much longer be permitted."

"And how," said the baron, "will it be changed?" and he poked the fire to conceal a yawn. Excellent man! his time latterly had been more given to the investigation of opera than of the exact sciences.

"Through my theory of Progression and Proportion in geographical statistics, by which the sources of the Nile can be easily determined from the volume and speed of that current, while the height of the mountains on the far side of the moon will be but a pleasing sum in Ratio for a scholar's vacations. Nor will anything content me, my dear Hohenfels, till this somewhat theoretical method of traveling is displaced by bodily progression; till these easy excursions of the mind are supplemented by material extensions; till the foot is pressed where the brain has leaped; and till I, then for the first time a traveler, stand behind the lunar rim, among the 'silent silver lights and darks undreamed of!'"

"I am unable to appreciate your divagations," humbly observed Hohenfels, "though I always thought your language beautiful. Meantime, my hat is spoiled in coming hither, and you have the effrontery to write bucolics to me during the most frightful weather of the year. Once for all, do you refuse me an um—"

He did not finish his sentence. A world of sunshine burst like a bomb into the chamber, and our eyes were dazzled with the splendor: a sturdy beam shot directly into the fireplace, and the embers turned haggard and gray, and quickly retired from the unequal contest. I opened the window. A warm air, faint with the scent of earth and turf, invaded the apartment, and the map-like patches of dampness on the asphaltum pavement were rapidly and visibly drying away.

"I'm off!" said Hohenfels, with a rapid movement of retreat.

"But you are forgetting your—"

"What, my gloves?"

"No, the umbrella." And I presented him the heaviest and longest and oldest of my collection. He laughed: it was a hoary canopy which we had used beside the Neckar and in Heidelberg—"a pleasant town," as the old song says, "when it has done raining." We sealed a compact over the indestructible German umbrella. I agreed to defer for a fortnight my departure for Marly: on his side he made a solemn vow to come there on the first of May, and there receive in full and without wincing the particulars of my Progressive Geography. As he passed by the window I took care that he should catch a glimpse of me seated by accident in a strong light, my smoking-cap crowded down to my spectacles, and my nose buried in my old geographers.

For the next few days the weather supported the side of Hohenfels. It scattered rain, sunshine and spits of snow. At last the sun got the upper hand and remained master. The wisterias tumbled their cataracts of blue blossoms down the spouts; rare flowers, of minute proportions, burst from the button-holes of the young horsemen going to the Bois; the gloves of the American colony became lilac; hyacinths, daffodils and pansies moved by wagon-loads over the streets and soared to the windows of the sewing-girls. Overhead, in the steaming and cloud-marbled blue, stood the April sun. "Apelles of the flowers," as an old English writer has styled him, he was coloring the garden-beds with his rarest enamels, and spreading a sheet of varied tints over the steps of the Madeleine, where they hold the horticultural market.

This sort of country ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and enervating, tortured me. It disturbed my bibliophilist labors, and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old binding-leather. I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing, unattached to either home; and I bent from my windows over the throngs of festal promenaders, taciturn and uneasy. I fancied that wings were sprouting from my brown dressing-robe, and that they were the volatile wings of the moth or dragon-fly. But to establish myself at Marly before the baron, would not that be a breach of compact? Would he not make it a casus belli? Luckily, we were getting through April: to-morrow it would be the twenty-eighth.

On that memorable morning the sun rose strong and bright, and photographed a brilliant idea upon my cerebellum.

I would undertake a pedestrian attack upon Marly by winding my way around the suburbs of the capital. What more appropriate, for a profound geographer and tourist, than to measure with my walking-stick that enormous bed of gypsum, at the centre of which, like a bee in a sugar-basin, Paris sits and hums?

The notion gained upon me. Perhaps it was the natural reaction from the Mountains of the Moon; but in my then state of mind no prospect could appear more delicious than a long tramp among the quiet scenes through which the city fringes itself off into rurality. Those suburbs of blank convent walls! those curves of the Seine and the Marne, blocked with low villages, whose walls of white, stained with tender mould and tiled with brown, dipped their placid reflections into the stream! those droll square boats, pushing out from the sedges to urge you across the ferry! those long rafts of lumber, following, like cunning crocodiles, the ins and outs of the shallow Seine! those banks of pollard willows, where girls in white caps tended flocks of geese and turkeys, and where, every silver-spangled morning, the shore was a landscape by Corot, and every twilight a landscape by Daubigny! How exquisite these pictures became to my mind as I thought them forth one by one, leaning over a grimy pavement in the peculiar sultriness of the year's first warmth!

"Quick, Charles! my tin botany-box."

I could be at Marly on the first of May at the dinner hour as punctually as Hohenfels—before him, maybe. And after what a range of delicious experience! How he would envy me!

"Is monsieur going to travel all alone?" said keen old Charles, taking the alarm in a minute. "Why am I not to go along with monsieur?"

The accent of primitive fidelity was perfect. I observed casually, "I am going on a little journey of thirty-six hours, and alone. You can pack everything up, and go on to Marly as usual. You may go to-morrow."

"Shall I not go along with monsieur, then?" repeated Charles, with a turn for tautology not now for the first time manifested.

"What for? Am I a child?"

"Surely not—on the contrary. But, though Monsieur Paul has a sure foot and a good eye, and is not to say getting old, yet when a person is fifty it is not best for a person to run about the streets as if a person was a young person."

It was Josephine who did me the honor to address me the last remark.

I confess to but forty-five years of age; Hohenfels, quite erroneously, gives me forty-eight; Josephine, with that raw alacrity in leaping at computations peculiar to the illiterate, oppressed me with fifty. Which of us three knew best? I should like to ask. But it is of little consequence. The Easterns generally vaunt themselves on not knowing the day of their birth. And wisdom comes to us from the East.

I decided, for reasons sufficient to myself, to get out of Paris by the opposite side. I determined to make my sortie by way of the Temple Market and the Belleville abattoirs. On the thirtieth of April, at an ambitiously early hour, wearing my gardening cap, with my sketch-book sticking out of my pocket, my tin box in one hand and my stout stick in the other, I emerged among the staring porters of the neighboring houses, and it was in this equipment that I received the renewed lamentations of Charles and Josephine.

"Will you dare to go along the Boulevard looking like that, sir?" said Josephine.

"A gentleman in a cap! They'll take you for a bricklayer—indeed they will, sir," said Charles; "or rather for a milkman, with his tin can. I can't stand that: I will carry it rather myself, though I feel my rheumatics on these damp pavements."

"Monsieur Paul must take a cab—at least to the barrier: it will not be pleasant to make a scandal in the street."

"Who will tend Monsieur Paul these two days, now?" This was uttered with manly grief by Charles.

"And whoever will cook for him along the road?" It was Josephine who asked the question with a heavy sigh.

To make an end of this charming scene of Old Virginia faithfulness, I put my best leg out and departed with gymnastic sprightliness. An instant after I turned my head.

Charles and Josephine were fixed on the doorstep, following me with their regards, and I believed I saw a tear in the left eye of each. What fidelity! I smiled in a sort of indulgent and baronial manner, but I felt touched by their sensibility.

Come on! It is but a twenty-four hours' separation.

Go forth, then, as I remember saying long ago, without fear and with a manly heart, to meet the dim and shadowy Future.

EDWARD STRAHAN.

[!-- H2 anchor --]

FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE.

[!--IMG--]

In 1832 a few adventurous men obtained a charter for a railroad from Baltimore to Port Deposit: other charters were granted by Delaware and Pennsylvania in succeeding years, and at last in 1838 all were consolidated as the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Company, and became a through all-rail line, interrupted only by the Susquehanna and some minor water-courses, under one management, beginning at Philadelphia and ending at Baltimore. But the country was too young and weak to make this a strong road, either in capital or business. It struggled along with a heavy debt, poor road-bed, imperfect rail (in some parts the old strap rail), few locomotives and cars, and inconvenient dépôts, making but little progress up to 1851, when Mr. Samuel M. Felton was brought from Boston to assume the presidency.

Seeing the actual and future importance of the line, some Eastern men bought up the stock, put in the necessary money and encouraged Mr. Felton to begin an entire revolution in the road. The road-bed was perfected and widened for a double track, new dépôts erected in Baltimore and Philadelphia, new rails laid, new branches opened; and whereas Mr. Felton found the road with only a single track, 25 locomotives and 308 cars, he left it with many miles of double track, its dépôts rebuilt, 49 locomotives and 1145 cars. When he took the road its locomotives traveled 312,840 miles per year, and earned $718,010, at a cost of $252,184.54: when he left it, borne down by disease, the locomotives traveled 780,537 miles per year, at a cost of $1,960,649. The capital stock in 1851 was $3,850,000, and paid three and a half per cent.: it is now $13,486,250, and pays eight per cent.

When the war broke out in 1862 this road was the key of the continent, and the fact that it was officered and controlled by Northern and energetic men saved it from destruction or becoming an engine in the hands of our enemies. Over it hundreds of thousands of soldiers and citizens were carried to the front, and millions of tons of merchandise and supplies were poured into the quarter-master's, commissary's and medical departments all along the line.

In 1864, worn out by disease, the able manager laid down his authority, to be taken up by another vigorous New England man, who in his turn has given almost life-blood to carry the road on to greatness.

Since 1864 the advance in earnings has not been so great as in the four preceding years, because of the necessary reduction in travel and transportation since the war. But enormous improvements have been made, thousands of steel rails have been laid, locomotives, freight cars and passenger cars of the most beautiful description have been added to the stock, new dépôts made (some of the finest in the country), a new line planned and executed, carrying the road from the meadows and marshes of the Delaware through the valleys and beautiful rolling uplands of Delaware county to Chester, avoiding all danger from floods, and going over or under twenty-seven streets to enter the city without possible peril to life or limb. A whole railroad system subsidiary to this road has been developed in Delaware, and to-day, with the best road-bed, double tracks, steel rails, the best locomotives, the best passenger cars in the country, supplied with all the modern improvements of brake, platform and signal, and a perfectly drilled corps of subordinates, this road may challenge the attention of the country, and be pointed out as one of the best evidences of the growth and prosperity of Philadelphia.

The dépôt in Philadelphia, at the corner of Broad street and Washington avenue, is a large and spacious building, which does not pretend to be a model of domestic architecture, but is roomy and reasonably well ventilated. The bell rings, we take our seats and move out through the usual coal-yards and shanties and suburbs, passing the United States Arsenal, until we reach Gray's Ferry, where we see the Schuylkill, beautiful at high tide, the high banks opposite once a famous estate, now the seat of the Almshouse, where four thousand paupers live in the winter and about fifteen hundred in the summer. So mild and pleasant is this climate that the majority of the paupers creep out, like the blue bottleflies, with the coming of spring, preferring to sleep in barns or under the green trees all the summer, rather than endure the hard beds, discipline and regular habits of the Almshouse. The rains of summer may fill their old bones with rheumatism for winter, but there are charms in the life of the stroller, who feeds to-day at a farm-house, or works a few hours to-morrow for a trifle to get whisky and tobacco, but has no notes to pay, no house to maintain, no servants to support.

Gray's Ferry is an old historic name, for here Washington and the men of the Revolution crossed again and again. The old rope ferry was succeeded by the old horse ferry, and now there are three railroads here—the Darby Improvement, the Junction (which goes to West Philadelphia and makes the connection for the great Southern Air-line), and the old line, which leads us out, through the old Bartram Gardens, where an enthusiastic botanist made the first and best collection of trees and plants in this country, on to the marshes of the Delaware. The mighty river, widening into a bay, flows on to the ocean, its bosom furrowed by thousands of keels and whitened by myriad sails. We look over wide acres of marshes, now green with the tender colors of spring, the corn-fields of the higher portion giving by their brown earth beautiful contrasts of color, the rows of corn just coming into sight. All over these meadows stand huge oak trees and elms, amongst whose branches the vessels seem to glide. But beautiful as the scene is, it is a bad place for a railroad, for when the great river rushes down swollen by some freshet, and is met by the incoming tide, the water sets back over the marshes and threatens to sweep away the track or put out the fires of the locomotives; and to cross streams and tideways many draw-bridges, with their attendant dangers, must be maintained. To avoid all these difficulties, Mr. Hinckley planned the change which is known as the Darby Improvement, carrying the road from Gray's Ferry to Chester over and through the high lands of Darby and Ridley. We shall no longer hear the brakeman shout out "Gibson's," "Lazaretto,", "Tinicum" (called by the Indians Tenecunck), "Crum Creek." We shall no longer wonder that the train should be stopped for so few passengers to get on or off, for in future our car will take us over a road-bed so perfectly laid with steel rails that a full glass of water will not spill as the train hurries on through a thickly settled country. Look quickly from the window at the country you are traversing: see the beautiful station at Bonnaffon, and the magnificent oak tree, worth a hundred stations, that stands in a field just beyond. We cannot enumerate all the beauties and objects of interest that line the road: every valley opens a pleasant view, every hill is covered with handsome houses, comfortable farmeries or superb trees. Before the road was made, these lands, lying on a ridge high above the river, perfectly healthy and offering the most desirable homes for city people, were inaccessible, but now they can be reached, and have been already appreciated. Most of the land has grown too valuable for farming, and has been bought up and laid out with different degrees of care for suburban residences.

[!--IMG--]

Darby is one of the oldest towns in the State, and contributes largely to the business of the road. Mills were built here in 1696, and it was divided into Upper and Lower Darby in 1786. The first of the new towns is Sharon Hill, where a large amount of land has been laid out in the rectangular method, and already many of the lots are sold to actual settlers: a machine-shop has been established, and the railroad has built a very nice station for passengers.

Next to Sharon Hill comes Glenolden, where hill and dale, wood and meadow and a beautiful stream, offer all the picturesqueness that can charm an enthusiastic or artistic eye, together with good building-sites and every advantage that fertile and forest-clad land can give to one who would exchange the heat and pavements of a city for rural life. From Glenolden it is but a short distance to Norwood and to Moore's Crossing, where the company are erecting turnouts, engine-houses, etc., and from here, eight miles from the city, numerous trains will run to Philadelphia to accommodate the workingmen who, it is believed, will come out to live on these cool and breezy uplands.

[!--IMG--]

GLENOLDEN.

From Moore's we soon get to Ridley Park, which was described at length in a former Number. The two stations at Ridley are models of beauty in their way: the principal station spans the road-bed, wide enough here for four tracks, and is probably the most picturesque in the country, as well as very convenient. Crum Lynne Station is remarkable for the beautiful sculpture of the capitals of the pilasters to the architraves of the windows, the architect having designed each one for this building, using the flowers and fruits and birds and animals of the region for his ornamental work, instead of the usual cornice and frieze and capital of Grecian architecture.

[!--IMG--]

[!--IMG--]

CRUM LYNNE FALLS.

But the train sweeps us away from Ridley limits, past Leiperville with its primeval railway, and on to . As we round the curve and rush through the woods we see on the left the broad river with its three-masted schooners, ships and steamers, and on the right the spires and houses of the town; and first and predominant the Military School of Colonel Hyatt. This school was incorporated by act of Legislature in 1862, and is devoted to both civil and military education. The studies and drill are so combined as to secure good mental and physical culture; and to ensure good military instruction the State and the United States have contributed arms of all kinds. Scholars come from all parts of the country, and even the West Indies; and as the standard of scholarship is high, the graduates compare favorably with those from other institutions.

[!--IMG--]

Chester is one of the oldest towns on the line of the road by actual years, but one of the youngest in growth. First called by the Indians Mackaponacka, and then by the settlers Upland, it had a justice of the peace court in 1676. Its court-house was built in 1724. Its first newspaper was published in 1819. For many years Chester dozed away in dignified quiet as the county-town: its court-house and jail gave it all the honor it required. But the streams made good mill-sites, the deep waterfront along the river offered splendid wharfage and chances for shipbuilding, and, as good luck would have it, a rivalry awoke which ended in loading Media with the county buildings and relieving Chester. Since then it has doubled and trebled: mills and factories are on all sides, and its shipyards are not easily surpassed. Roach's shipyard covers twenty-three acres. The firm make their own engines and everything required in iron shipbuilding from keel to topmast. They have six vessels now on the stocks, and employ eleven hundred men, and have room for sixteen hundred. They have built for every trade from the coaster to the East Indiaman, varying in size from six hundred to four thousand tons, and their vessels pass unchallenged amongst the best in the world.

[!--IMG--]

VIEW OF CHESTER.

Nor is trade the only feature of the town. About half a mile from the dépôt, on a gentle eminence, is the Crozer Theological Seminary. The approach from Chester for the pedestrian, along the shrub-, vine- and tree-clad banks of Chester Creek into and across the wide lawn, is a delightful walk. The principal building was erected by John P. Crozer for a normal school. During the war he gave it to the government for a hospital, and when he died in 1866 left it to his sons, desiring them to devote it to some benevolent use. They have responded in a munificent manner by establishing a school for training young men for the ministry, with accommodations for a hundred students, houses for the professors, a church, a library building, lecture-halls and all the required conveniences for a great and successful school. They have added an endowment fund of two hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars, the whole gift being about three hundred and ninety thousand dollars, and one of the family has since given twenty-five thousand dollars as a library fund. The seminary was opened in 1868 with fifteen students: there are now fifty from all parts of the Union.

[!--IMG--]

But the most complaisant conductor of the most accommodating special train could not wait any longer for us, and we must hurry on through Lamokin, where the Baltimore Central, a tributary road, turns off and traverses a most picturesque country, round by Port Deposit to Perryville, where it again reaches the main road. At Lamokin are works where steel of a peculiar kind is manufactured under a European patent. From here the road again clings to the shore of the Delaware, and until we reach Wilmington the river, with its sails and its blue water, is on the left—on the right a high ridge, which ends in the valley of the Shell Pot and Brandywine at Wilmington.

We flash past Linwood to stop a moment at Claymont, where the ridge comes nearer the river and offers superb sites for buildings. Why Claymont has not grown more no one seems to know. There are schools and churches, fine rolling land, noble river-views, and all that can make a country home delightful. That the place has attractions for lovers of the picturesque may be inferred from the fact that it counts among its residents an artist of such wide and well-founded celebrity as Mr. F.O.C. Darley, whose delineations of American life and scenery, especially in the form of book-illustrations, have been familiar to the public for the past thirty years. With so many years of fame, Mr. Darley counts but fifty-two of life, and in the enjoyment of vigorous health still continues the practice of his art, executing many commissions from Europe, where his genius is as highly appreciated as at home.

[!--IMG--]

VIEW OF DELAWARE RIVER NEAR CLAYMONT.

[!--IMG--]

[!--IMG--]

VIEW AT CLAYMONT: CREEK AND BRIDGE.

But we must stick to our train, which carries us through the Red Bank Cut to Ellerslie Station, where occurred the first accident of a serious character which has happened on this road for eighteen years, and which was due only to a willful violation of orders by an old and very trusted conductor. At Ellerslie are the Edgemoor Iron-works of Messrs. William Sellers & Co., where every known improvement in the manufacture of iron is being tested and applied. The next curve in the road shows us the meadows of the Shell Pot and the Brandywine, with Wilmington in the distance. The Brandywine, famous in our history, runs through as picturesque a valley as there is in America, combining all that the climate of Delaware permits in trees, shrubs, vines and flowers with the wildness and variety of the valley of the Pemigewasset or the wild Ammonoosuck. In this rare valley are mills as old as the settlement of the country, and quaint hamlets that seem to belong to Europe rather than America.

At Wilmington the system of the Delaware railroads begins: it spreads out over the peninsula of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland like a huge left hand. The thumb touches Chestertown and Centreville, the fore finger Oxford, the middle finger Cambridge, the ring finger Crisfield, the little finger Lewes; and this hand gathers into the main road every year millions of baskets of peaches, and millions more of oysters in baskets and sacks, and crates of berries, and car-loads of hardwood and lumber. Under the influence of these roads the sleepy peninsula is beginning a new career.

We cannot go down the peninsula, so let us keep on to Baltimore, pausing, however, for a moment as we cross Mason and Dixon's line near Elkton. Little did Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon dream, as they set that tangent point for the determination of the boundary-lines of the three States, how famous they would become. But there the simple monument stands in the open fields, and there it must remain so long as the three States need a boundary.

Soon after leaving Mason and Dixon we strike the first of the great estuaries of the Delaware and Susquehanna, which are the delight of the sportsman, the naturalist and the tourist. No matter at what season of the year you approach North-east, Principio, the Susquehanna River or Stemmer's Run—no matter at what time of the day—the views are always fine. The water spreads out in huge widening bays, and loses itself in the forest or hides behind some projecting headland; and when, as is often the case, the surface of the water is actually darkened with large flocks of wild fowl, the variety as well as beauty of the scene could not be heightened. Such shooting-ground for sportsmen exists nowhere else on this coast easily accessible. At Perryville, Havre de Grace, Bush River and many other places the chance sportsman can find every accommodation, while clubs of gentlemen have leased many of the best points, and established little houses where they may be comfortable when the day's sport is over, and where they can leave from season to season boats, decoys and all the paraphernalia of the sport. To recount the names of canvas-backs, red heads, bald pates and innumerable other ducks, to tell of the tens, fifties, hundreds shot in a single day, would add nothing to the excitement of any sportsman who has seen from the cars the huge flocks of birds rise and sweep out to sea when scared by some passing train or boat.

[ [!--IMG--]

PRINCIPIO.

[!--IMG--]

BRIDGE OVER THE SUSQUEHANNA AT HAVRE DE GRACE.

If every passenger could stop once, and study the Susquehanna bridge crossing the river between Perryville and Havre de Grace, he would have a most profound respect for its projectors and builders. For many years all transport by cars was interrupted here, and travelers and merchandise were transported by ferry-boat, causing wearisome delays and extra expense. But now a bridge 3273 feet long and with 1000 feet of trestling, resting on thirteen huge piers built on foundations in water from twenty-seven to sixty feet deep, and costing a million and a half of dollars, carries all safely over, and defies floods and ice. This bridge, one of the triumphs of engineering and a just source of pride to the road, has already saved in time and trouble a large percentage of its cost. It was threatened the past winter by the ice-pack which filled the river back to Port Deposit, and which seemed to promise for some time the destruction of that well-named little town. It is hard to believe that in a country so extensive as ours, with all kinds of lands and town-sites, any one could begin to build a town in such a situation. It clings to the broken and rocky shores and hillsides as lichens adhere to rocks and to the bark of trees or swallows' nests to the eaves of a barn. There it is, however, and, judging from its costly houses, churches and business appearance, its inhabitants have found it a profitable place to stay in. Port Deposit last winter, when the river was filled with ice from shore to shore and for miles in both directions, fissured and cracked and covered with mud, logs and débris, seemed on the verge of destruction; and it was easy to believe that if the river did rise suddenly the moving mass of ice, like some huge glacier, would sweep away all evidences of humanity, leaving behind only the glacial scratches and the roches moutonnées. Overhanging the railroad is a very remarkable profile rock which has attained some celebrity, and is shown in one of our sketches.

[!--IMG--]

MOUNT ARARAT--PROFILE ROCK.

[!--IMG--]

PORT DEPOSIT.

From Port Deposit to Baltimore the country is more rolling than from Perryville to Wilmington, and there are many picturesque points. One could find at Gunpowder River and Stemmer's Run several beautiful points of view, but by the time he reaches these places the traveler begins to get impatient for the great city, the terminus of his wanderings, which soon begins to announce itself by more thickly congregated houses, and roads cut straight through hill and valley, regardless of cost or the destruction of local charms of hill and dale.

If one were to judge by the streets, he would think Baltimorians lived only on oysters, for the new streets seem wholly built of their shells, making them very white, glaring and offensive to the unaccustomed eye. But the attention is soon diverted from houses and roads, to the bay and to Fort McHenry, which lies before the town like a sleeping lion. Few forts in the country are more interesting or have played a more important part in our military history; but all its military reputation is less interesting than the fact that whilst confined to a British vessel, one of the fleet unsuccessfully bombarding the fort, Francis Key wrote the "Star-Spangled Banner," now a national hymn. A bomb thrown into the fort at that time by the British has been preserved on a pillar ever since—almost the only local reminder of the facts of the bombardment.

[!--IMG--]

FORT MCHENRY.

[!--IMG--]

THE BRITISH SHELL.

At Baltimore we leave the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, sorry to part from so good a road and one so important to the welfare of the country. It is a link in the great system, and one kept very bright and well polished by its managers. Their course has been to pay only a moderate dividend, and use the rest of the earnings to improve the road and its belongings, and to foster the interests of the people who use it. Such wise policy must build it strongly into the affections and interests of those who live along it, and ensure its being each year a better and better-paying road.

ROBERT MORRIS COPELAND.

[!-- H2 anchor --]

CHARITY CROSS.

Tinted are her cheeks with rose

She is waiting in the snows

Of the falling apple-blows.

Tinklings of a drowsy rill

Come from the upland orchard hill,

Niches in her dreams to fill.

Dotted is her rustic shawl

With the apple-leaves that fall:

Twilight splendors cover all.

Deeper lined than earthly grace,

Rest of heaven doth in her face

Rejoice in its abiding-place.

Charity Cross, it groweth late:

Household duties for you wait,

Just beyond the garden-gate.

Leave the apple-blooms to fall,

Far-off brook to vainly call:

Lightly climb the orchard wall.

All your dreamings softly fold:

Let them drift away untold

In the dying sunset's gold.

Down the path that leads between

Ferns and mosses, shaded green,

The gabled house is dimly seen.

Winds, with poplar trees at play,

Chafe with tossing boughs all day

Weather-beaten walls of gray.

Open wide the trellised door:

Sunset glories go before,

Fall upon the kitchen floor,

Turn to gold the swinging loom

Standing in the corner's gloom

Of the low brown-raftered room.

Brazen dogs that ever sleep

Silently the entrance keep

Of the fireplace huge and deep.

Charity, stop no more to dream:

Covers lift with puffing steam;

Waiting stands the risen cream.

Change to white your apron gray,

Sprinkled clothes to fold away,

Ready for another day.

Quickly now the table spread

With its homespun cloth of red,

Savory meats and snowy bread.

On the shelf a pink-lipped shell,

That for ever tries to tell

Ocean music, learned so well.

Tiptoe on the cricket stand:

Take it in your sun-browned hand—

LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

JULY, 1873.Vol XII, No. 28.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

[!-- H2 anchor --] I.—PREAMBULARY.

FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE.

CHARITY CROSS.

JULY, 1873.
Vol XII, No. 28.