Harper’s Ferry, a town supported of old almost entirely by the arsenal works, is a desolate little stronghold among towering mountains, the ruins being in the foreground.  The precipices on either side of the river belong to the Elk Ridge, through which, at some antediluvian period, the colossal current has hewed its way.  At the base of the Virginia side of the mountains, hugged in by the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, and by Loudon and Bolivar Heights, cowers the town.

[Illustration:  BATTLE-GROUNDS OF THE POTOMAC VALLEY.]

Across the river towers the mighty cupola of Maryland Height, far overtopping the other peaks, and farther down the stream, like a diminishing reflection of it, the softer swell of South Mountain.  An ordinary rifle-cannon on Maryland Height can with the greatest ease play at bowls to the other summits.  From this eminence one Colonel Ford, on September 13, 1862, toppled down his spiked and coward cannon:  the hostile guns of the enemy quickly swarmed up the summit he had abandoned, and the Virginia crests of Loudon and Bolivar belched with rebel artillery.  The town was surrendered by Colonel Miles at the very moment when McClellan, pressing forward through the passes of South Mountain from Frederick, was at hand to relieve it:  Miles was killed, and the considerable military stores left in the village were bagged by Stonewall Jackson.  Flushed with this temporary advantage, Jackson proceeded to join Lee, who then advanced from Sharpsburg and gave unsuccessful battle to the Union forces at Antietam Creek.

This stream pours into the Potomac just above, from the Maryland side.  It gives its name to one of the most interesting actions of the war.  The fields of Antietam and Gettysburg were the only two great battle grounds on which the Confederates played the role of invaders and left the protection of their native States.  Antietam was the first, and if it could have been made for Lee a more decisive failure, might have prevented Gettysburg.  It occurred September 15th to 18th, 1862.  Lee had just thoroughly whipped that handsome Western braggart, General Pope, and, elated with success, thought he could assume the offensive, cross the Potomac, and collect around his banner great armies of dissatisfied secessionists to the tune of “Maryland, my Maryland.”  McClellan (then in the last month of his command over the army of the Potomac) pushed with unwonted vigor over the mountains, inspired, it is said, by the accidental foreknowledge of Lee’s whole Maryland plan, and clashed with Lee across the bridges of this pretty highland stream.  As an episode he lost Harper’s Ferry; but that was a trifle.  It was a murderous duel, that which raged around the Dunker church and over the road leading from Sharpsburg to Hagerstown.  Lee’s forty thousand men were shielded by an elbow of the Potomac; his batteries of horse-artillery under Stuart were murdering the forces of Hooker, when that general was relieved by the support of Mansfield;