Pretty soon, as we look over into Maryland, we have indicated for us the site of old Fort Frederick, until lately traceable, but now completely obliterated.  It was an interesting relic of the old Indian wars.  Shortly after Braddock’s defeat on the Monongahela, when the Indians had become very bold, and had almost depopulated this part of Maryland, Fort Frederick was erected by Governor Sharpe as a menace, and garrisoned with two hundred men.  It was an immediate moral victory, awing and restraining the savages, though no decided conflict is known to have occurred from its construction to its quiet rotting away within the present generation.  Those were the days when Frederick in Maryland and Chambersburg in Pennsylvania were frontier points, the Alleghanies were Pillars of Hercules, and all beyond was a blank!

Still continuing our course on the Virginia side of the Potomac, through what is known in this State as the Virginia Valley, while in Pennsylvania the same intervale is called the Cumberland Valley, we admire the increasing sense of solitude, the bowery wildness of the river-banks, and the spirited freshness of the hastening water.  At a station of delightful loneliness we alight.

Here Sir John’s Run comes leaping from the hills to slide gurgling into the Potomac, and at this point we attain Berkeley Springs by a dragging ascent of two miles and a half in a comfortable country stage.  Sir John’s Run was called after Sir John Sinclair, a quartermaster in the doomed army of Braddock.  The outlet into the Potomac is a scene of quiet country beauty, made dignified by the hills around the river.  A hot, rustic station of two or three rooms, an abandoned factory building—­tall, empty-windowed and haunted-looking—­gone clean out for want of commerce, like a lamp for lack of oil.  Opposite the station a pretty homespun tavern trellised with grapes, a portrait of General Lee in the sitting-room, and a fat, buxom Virginia matron for hostess.  All this quiet scene was once the locality of the hot hopes and anxieties of genius, and it is for this reason we linger here.

When the little harbor at the mouth of Sir John’s Run was still more wild and lonely than now, James Rumsey, a working bath-tender at Berkeley Springs, launched upon it a boat that he had invented of novel principle and propulsive force.  The force was steam, and Rumsey had shown his model to Washington in 1780.  First discoverers of steam-locomotion are turning up every few months in embarrassing numbers, but we cannot feel that we have a right to suppress the claims of honest Rumsey, the protege of Washington.  The dates are said to be as follows:  Rumsey launched his steamboat here at Sir John’s Run in 1784, before the general and a throng of visitors from the Springs; in 1788, John Fitch launched another first steamboat on the Delaware, and sent it successfully up to Burlington; in 1807, Robert Fulton set a third first steamboat on the Hudson, the Clermont.  Rumsey’s