few stray glints of sunshine that straggle through the green canopy. So in Maryland. Between the waters of the Chesapeake and the Atlantic there dwelt a race, Americans, and yet not Americans. Men who seemed to have been bred in Westmorland Manor-houses and Northumbrian halls, and then grafted into Maryland, with shoots of democracy and slavery combined. Northward their neighbours were racing and hurrying; southward their compatriots were sleeping; here on the "Eastern shore" they were alive and well, and resting. Nature gave them plenty, fisheries and corn-lands and forests; the black race were their servants, and the good men followed slowly, if they followed at all the "almighty dollar." They could talk fondly of monarchies, and almost lovingly of French Henrietta Maria— for them heraldry had a charm. Yet withal these patriarchs ate not the bread of idleness;-the father watched his maize-fields and cotton-blooms, the young men took their guns into the forest, or drew the seines of their negro fishermen, while the ladies hovered between memories of the old country and enthusiastic patriotism ; and amid all quietly governed the household and the "people."

The descendants of good Friend Penn and my Lord Baltimore could not exactly settle the boundaries of their estates; a rather weighty matter seeing that the properties together embraced an area equal to England and Wales; so they sent over two commissioners to survey the ground and fix lines of division. Hence sprung into existence "Mason and Dixon's line," the acknowledged boundary between the two States of Maryland and Pennsylvania; yet further it became the dividing line between free soil and slave soil. That line has now been washed out in blood. It is but ten years ago

since the Governor's daughter in Virginia, pleaded with tears for the life of old John Brown, but in vain; the Southerners clamoured for his life and the North looked coldly on. In a little while a change came. There was no apathy now on the part of the North. By Harper's Ferry flowed and flowed again the tide of strife. The mounds of Gettysburg, the earthworks of Antietam, the desolated Shenandoah, with Richmond's leagues of ruins, prove how earnest and resolute were the contending foemen. The conscience of the North was roused to action, and its blood to fever-heat; and then neither woman's pleadings, nor rifle and bayonet could save the life of slavedom, or win a respite for the empire whose corner-stone it was. Well might the negro soldiery and their northern comrades sing round their camp-fires and when moving to the battle,

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

But his soul is marching on.

There is but a step "from the sublime to the ridiculous," from the exalted to the common-place. Our reverie is broken in upon by a boy, who comes to us in the cars as a vender of chess-men, made from vegetable ivory grown in some Mammoth Grove or Yo-Semite valley, and wrought into the similitude of pawn and knight by Pennsylvanian carvers. Their cunning was learnt, perchance, in Swiss 'Chalet' or Norwegian 'Hoff.' Anyhow, the fingers which have fashioned out of the hard beech, fans for the ladies of Geneva, and angels and apostles for pulpits in the valleys of Sulitelma, take kindly enough to the hard white nuts from California.

The train stops and we are at Baltimore. First impressions are not favourable. The city stands upon sloping hills much in the position of old world Douglas

or St. Helier. Its authorities would do well to take a lesson from the Paris "Board of Works" in the matter of drains. Probably no city in the world is so well drained as the French metropolis, whose conduits and subways you might navigate in a boat for miles; the same cannot be said of Baltimore, open gutters emit anything but wholesome smells under the fierce sun of "dog days." Right up to wharfs on the Chesapeake and Patapscot come large sea-going ships. The Bremen line of steamers after calling at Norfolk, Virginia, come up here. emigrants which they bring are sent inland to the West, over the Alleghanies, via Baltimore and Ohio Railway. The Chesapeake abounds with oysters and terrapin, which are famous not only in the epicurean cities of the North, but also in London, in Paris and in St. Petersburg. All along the water side are packing-sheds for the oyster trade, and millions of refuse shells are scattered on the ground.

The

Far inland stretch the waters of the bay, and nervous people would cringe as they cross them on the railway bridges. These constructions, partly on piles and partly on piers, might be claimed by American engineers as wooden suspension bridges, for the very bends even are formed from planks of timber. Baltimore-street is the Broadway of the Regent City. Great is its bustle and traffic. "Our trade was with the South, and consequently our sympathies were with the South," said a merchant to me, and he went on to say "down here we are all Democrats and haters of the Republican party." Baltimore has been called the City of Monuments, but though its monuments are beautiful they are only two in number. The North Point one is a fine pedestal of granite, from which shoots up a spiral column raised in memory of "1814"; while the other is of more

pretentious dimensions. Washington monument is somewhat like "The Monument" in London, but much more beautiful. From a large square basement rises a long shaft 100 feet high or more, of purest white marble. You may mount to its summit, and look down upon the city. This great work was subscribed for by the State of Maryland. Catholicism is not supreme in the city, for the Wesleyans are also strong and numerous, and a little temple has just been raised by Northern-men for Congregational worship.

Away from the rattle of Baltimore-street is the region of villas and houses of the rich; and very nice they look, built of bright red brick with window-sills and steps of white marble. These steps are honored beyond all other steps in the world, for seated upon them the fair ladies of Baltimore receive their visitors on summer evenings. The purple flowers of the morning-glory hang over from the garden-wall hard by, and as the breeze springs up and comes landward to temper the noon-day heat into evening coolness, out come the fair daughters of Maryland; visitors and hostess are attired in white, and flit about without hat or bonnet as we English do in our gardens in July. The scene reminds us of another hemisphere, where our Australian friends pic-nic under the gum-trees; and still further away, we are carried back to the soft Grecian clime, when Plato and his disciples walked in the groves of Academæ. Beyond the city stand the white cabins of the negroes-freemen who cultivate their little corn-patches and flower-beds, for they are no longer slaves.

We are bound half-a-day's journey westward to see a great sight. Midway on our journey we come upon piles of ruins; they are the monuments of flood. Here

stood a dozen factories for cotton, woollen and ironbuilt along the Patapscot, apparently safely secured from freshets by strong outer and inner river-walls of solid masonry, 15 feet thick. The terrible flood of August, 1868, came and swept them all away, mill and bulwark; of Elicot's mills only ruins remain.

Now we pass through a tunnel and along a gorge in the mountains-Maryland Heights and John Brown's cliffs are frowning above us, and close at hand is Point of Rocks. Here amid scenery wonderfully wild and sublime, from the north the turbulent Potomac pours through a gorge in the Blue Ridge, while to the south-west, the Patapscot bursts the granite bands of the Alleghanies, as the Missouri rolls its floods through the "Gates of the Rocky Mountains." Below is Harper's Ferry, the scene of John Brown's attempt to free the slaves. For this he died a martyr, but from the ashes of such men "spring an hundred-fold." The enthusiastic free-soiler, who had won laurels in "bleeding Kansas," and death on a Virginian scaffold, now sleeps in a quiet grave at Elva in freedom-loving Vermont; but the heaven-consecrated principle of liberty to the slave, for which he died, is not likely to slumber again in Free America.

The name of Stonewall Jackson was a household word on both sides of the Ferry during the war-times. You know what was Tilly's beau-ideal of an army! It was to be composed of many units, each unit a "ragged soldier and a bright musket." You could have seen this spectacle to sorrowful perfection, when the poor, hungry, ragged yet lion-hearted Confederates entered Maryland through these gorges on their way into Pennsylvania, to fight the battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg is the monument of war across the northern line, southward their number is legion. The Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut told