then Mansfield was killed and Hooker wounded; and then Sedgwick was sent up to replace Mansfield; then, when Sedgwick was getting the better of Jackson and Hood, McLaws and Walker drew up to the Confederate left, and burst completely through Sedgwick’s line.  Presently, Franklin and Smith came across from the stream and reinforced the Federals, driving the Southern advance back to the church, and Burnside rendered some hesitating assistance; but then rushed up the force which had received the surrender of Harper’s Ferry, singing victory, and drove back Burnside; and when McClellan, on the morning of the 19th, found that Lee had withdrawn across the Potomac, he was too much discouraged with his own hurts to venture a pursuit.  He had lost twelve thousand men, and Lee eight thousand.  But Antietam, though for us a costly and unsatisfactory victory, was for the South a conclusive lesson.  The Peter-the-Hermit excursion into Maryland lasted just two weeks, and its failure was signal and instructive.  Intended as an invasion that should result in the occupation of Washington and Philadelphia, it led to nothing but to Stuart’s audacious raid into Pennsylvania with his thousand troopers—­a theatrical flourish to wind up an unsuccessful drama.  As for Harper’s Ferry, its overwhelming punishment and precipitate conquest were not without their use:  the retention by the Federals of the little depot of army stores on the Virginia bank surprised and thwarted Lee.  To reduce it, he had to pause, and ere the operation was complete McClellan was upon him, and cornered him before he was enabled to take up a firm position in Western Maryland and prepare for the Pennsylvania invasion.  The Ferry fell into our hands again, but as a ruin.  As for the elaborate bridge approaching it, its history is the history of the Potomac campaign:  three times has it been destroyed by the Confederates, and twice by the Unionists.  Eight times it has been carried away by freshets.

An earlier interest, yet intimately connected with the rebellion, belongs to Harper’s Ferry.  From the car window you see the old engine-house where John Brown fortified himself, and was wounded and captured, while these wooded hills were bathed with October red in 1859.  The breaches in the walls where he stood his siege are still apparent, filled in with new brickwork.  No single life could have been so effectually paid out as his was, for he cemented in the cause of the North the whole abolition sentiment of the civilized world, and gained our army unnumbered recruits.  Truly said the slaves when he died, “Massa Brown is not buried:  he is planted.”

Of the site of all these storied ruins we can only say again and again that it is beautiful.  The rocky steeps that enclose the town have a Scottish air, and traveled visitors, beholding them, are fain to allude to the Trosachs; but the river that rolls through the mountains, and has whirled them into a hollow as the potter turns a vase, is continental in its character, and plunges through the landscape with a swell of eddy and a breadth of muscle that are like nothing amid the basking Scottish waters.