There is a good deal of honest sport still to be had in the adjacent hills:  the streams yield trout, and various larger prey, for which the favorite bait is a small ugly fish called helgamite.  The woods contain turkeys, pheasants, quail and woodcock.  The region has a valuable interpreter in the person of General David H. Strother, so agreeably known to the public as “Porte Crayon,” whose father was lessee of the Springs, and who at one period himself conducted the hotel.  He addicts himself now to pen and pencil solely.  In the village, where he presides over a pretty cottage home, he has quite a circle of idolaters:  the neighbors’ houses display on their walls his sketches of the village eccentrics, attended by those accessories of dog or gun or nag which always stamp the likeness, and make the rustic critic cry out, “Them’s his very features!” A large, boisterous painting in the hotel represents his impressions of the village arena in his youth; and ancient gamesters, gray-headed now, like to stroll in and contemplate their own portraits grouped around the cock-pit in all the hot blood of betting days and in the green dress-coats of 1840.  Strother (now an active graybeard) was profoundly stirred by the outbreak of the rebellion.  His friends were slaveholders and Confederates:  he lived upon the mountain-line dividing the rich, proud, noble rebels of the eastern counties from the hungry and jealous loyalists of West Virginia.  He himself loved the State as Bruce loved Scotland, but he loved country better.  He shut himself up with his distracting problem for three days in utter privacy:  he emerged with his mind made up, a Union soldier.

“It must have been awkward for a Virginian to cast his lot against Virginia,” we observed to the stagedriver who bore us back to the station—­an ex-Federal soldier and a faithful devotee of Crayon’s.

“No awkwarder than for Virginia to go against her country:  that’s how we looked at it,” retorted the patriot.

Bidding adieu to Berkeley and its paternal landlord, we resume the steel road (that well-worn phrase of the “iron way” is a complete misnomer) with another glance of familiarity at the beautiful confluence of Sir John’s Run with the Potomac, where the sunny waters still seem to murmur of the landing of Braddock’s army and the novel disturbance of James Rumsey’s steamer.  The mountains extending from this point, the recesses of the Blue Ridge, in their general trend south-westerly through the State, are one great pharmacy of curative waters.  Jordan and Capper Springs, in the neighborhood of Winchester, lie thirty or forty miles to the south; and beneath those are imbedded the White, Black, Yellow, and we know not how many other colors in the general spectrum of Sulphurs.  It would perhaps be our duty to indicate more exactly the Bethesdas of this vast natural sanitarium, to which our present course gives us the key, but that task has already been performed, in a complete