“Tall pines and cedars wave their dark green crests.”

While in every direction you have a background of blue mountain tops, that play at bo-peep with you in the clouds.

After descending the last ridge we reached Haggerstown, a small neat place, between a town and a village; and here by the piety of the Presbyterian coach-masters, we were doomed to pass an entire day, and two nights, “as the accommodation line must not run on the sabbath.”

I must, however, mention, that this day of enforced rest was not Sunday.  Saturday evening we had taken in at Cumberland a portly passenger, whom we soon discovered to be one of the proprietors of the coach.  He asked us, with great politeness, if we should wish to travel on the sabbath, or to delay our journey.  We answered that we would rather proceed; “The coach, then, shall go on tomorrow,” replied the liberal coach-master, with the greatest courtesy; and accordingly we travelled all Sunday, and arrived at Haggerstown on Sunday night.  At the door of the inn our civil proprietor left us; but when we enquired of the waiter at what hour we were to start on the morrow, he told us that we should be obliged to pass the whole of Monday there, as the coach which was to convey us forward would not arrive from the east, till Tuesday morning.

Thus we discovered that the waiving the sabbath-keeping by the proprietor, was for his own convenience, and not for ours, and that we were to be tied by the leg for four-and-twenty hours notwithstanding.  This was quite a Yankee trick.

Luckily for us, the inn at Haggerstown was one of the most comfortable I ever entered.  It was there that we became fully aware that we had left Western America behind us.  Instead of being scolded, as we literally were at Cincinnati, for asking for a private sitting-room, we here had two, without asking at all.  A waiter, quite comme il faut, summoned us to breakfast, dinner, and tea, which we found prepared with abundance, and even elegance.  The master of the house met us at the door of the eating-room, and, after asking if we wished for any thing not on the table, retired.  The charges were in no respect higher than at Cincinnati.

A considerable creek, called Conococheque Creek, runs near the town, and the valley through which it passes is said to be the most fertile in America.

On leaving Haggerstown we found, to our mortification, that we were not to be the sole occupants of the bulky accommodation, two ladies and two gentlemen appearing at the door ready to share it with us.  We again started, at four o’clock, by the light of a bright moon, and rumbled and nodded through the roads considerably worse than those over the mountains.

As the light began to dawn we discovered our ladies to be an old woman and her pretty daughter.