papers.  In February, 1848, he bought The Cecil Democrat of Thomas M. Coleman, enlarged the paper, quadrupled its circulation, and refitted it with new material.  In 1865 he sold out the Democrat to Albert Constable and Judge Frederick Stump, and bought a farm in St. Mary’s county, Md., and engaged in agriculture.  Three years later, failing health of himself and family, induced him to sell his farm and remove to Middletown, Del., where he founded the Transcript, and resumed the business of a printer and publisher.  The Transcript was the first paper published in that town, and was a success from the start.  It was transferred in 1870 to his youngest son, Charles H. Vanderford.  From 1870 to 1878 he was associated with his eldest son, William H. Vanderford, in the publication of The Democratic Advocate, Westminster, Md.  In 1873 he was elected to the House of Delegates from Carroll county, and in 1879 to the Senate, in which body he held the important position of Chairman of the Committee on Finance, and was a member of the Committee on Engrossed Bills and the Committee on Printing.

On the 6th of June, 1839, he married Angelina, the daughter of Henry Vanderford, of Queen Anne’s county, a distant relative of his father.  Mr. Vanderford is a member of the Masonic Order, and he and his wife are both communicants of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Church of their ancestors, as far back as the history of the Church can be traced in the Eastern part of Maryland.  Charles Vanderford, great grandfather of the subject of this sketch, was a vestryman of St. Paul’s Parish, Centreville, Md., in 1719.  Charles Wrench Vanderford was his grandfather, and a member of the Old Maryland Line, in the Revolutionary war.  William Vanderford, his father, was a native of Queen Anne’s county, where the family held a grant of land of one thousand acres from the crown, located between Wye Mills and Hall’s Cross Roads, on which the old mansion was built of brick imported from England.

Mr. Vanderford is now in retiracy, in the 76th year of his age, but still active, and in the possession of good health and as genial and cheerful as in the days of his prime.

ON THE MOUNTAINS.

    Written after a visit to Rawley Springs, in the mountains of
    Virginia.

On the mountains!  Oh, how sweet! 
The busy world beneath my feet! 
Outspread before my raptur’d eyes
The wide unbounded prospect lies;
The panoramic vision glows
In beauty, grandeur and repose. 
I gaze into the vaulted blue
And on the em’rald fields below;
The genial sunlight shimmers down
Upon the mountain’s rugged crown,
The eye sweeps round the horizon
Until its utmost verge is won. 
The hoary peaks, with forests crown’d,
Spread their vast solitudes around,
And intervening rocks and rills
The eye with very transport fills.