It is all very well for the traveler of the nineteenth century to protest against the artificial and unromantic guidance of the railway:  he will find, after a little experience, that the homes of true romance are discovered for him by the locomotive; that solitudes and recesses which he would never find after years of plodding in sandal shoon are silently opened to him by the engineer; and that Timon now, seeking the profoundest cave in the fissures of the earth, reaches it in a Pullman car.

The silvery Capitoline dome at Washington floats up from among its garden trees, seeming to grow higher and higher as we recede from it.  Quickly dominating the low and mean buildings which encumber and try to hide it in its own neighborhood, it gradually rises superior to the whole city, growing greater as Washington grows less.  The first part of the course is over the loop of road newly acquired and still improving by the company—­a loop hanging downward from Baltimore, so as to sweep over Washington, and confer upon the through traveler the gift of an excursion through the capital.  This loop swings southwardly from Baltimore to a point near Frederick, Washington being set upon it like a bead in the midst.  The older road, like a mathematical chord, stretches still between the first points, but is occupied with the carrying of freight.  The tourist notices the stout beams of the bridges, the new look of the sleepers, and the sheen of the double lines of fresh steel rail:  he observes some heavy mason-work at the Monocacy River.  Two hours have passed:  at Frederick Junction he joins a road whose cuttings are grass-grown, whose quarried rocks are softened with lichen.  He is struck by the change, and with reason, for he is now being carried under the privileges of the first railroad charter granted in America.

We may not here undertake the story of the iron track, though it is from this very road that such a story must take its departure, and though we cannot grant that that story would be exceeded by any in the range of the author’s skill as a matter of popular interest.  This railroad, this “Baltimore and Ohio” artery, connects, through its origin, with the very beginnings of modern progress, and indeed with feudalism; for it was opened in 1828 by Charles Carroll, the patriot who had staked his broad lands of Carrollton in 1776 against the maintenance of feudalism in this country.  “I consider this,” said Carroll, after his slender and aristocratic hand had relinquished the spade, “among the most important acts of my life—­second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence.”  Railroads, excepting coal-mine trams, were as yet untried; Stephenson had not yet exhibited the Rocket; for travel and transportation the locomotive was unknown, and the Baltimoreans conceived their scheme while yet uncertain whether horse-power or stationary steam-engines would be the best acting force.  It was opened as far as Ellicott’s Mills as a