and very attractive manner, by Mr. Edward A. Pollard in his little work The Virginia Tourist.  Our present task is to attain the main wall of the Alleghany Mountains, which we do at the town of Cumberland, after passing through the grand curved tunnel at Pawpaw Ridge, and crossing Little Cacapon Creek, and traversing the South Branch, which is the larger and true Potomac, and admiring the lofty precipices, with arched and vaulted strata, on South Branch Mountain and at Kelly’s Rocks and Patterson Creek.

[Illustration:  CLIFF VIEW, CUMBERLAND NARROWS.]

It is but a prosaic consideration, but the bracing air of the mountain-ride from Berkeley Springs down to the railway station, and the rapid career thence to Cumberland, have given us the appetites of ogres.  We carry our pilgrim scrip into the town of Cumberland without much hope of having it generously filled, for this coaly capital, lost among its mountains, had formerly the saddest of reputations for hospitality.  The three or four little taverns were rivals in the art of how not to diet.  Accordingly, our surprise is equal to our satisfaction when we find every secret of a grand hotel perfectly understood and put in practice at the “Queen City,” the large house built and conducted by the railway company.  A competent Chicago purveyor, Mr. H.M.  Kinsley, who has the office of general manager of the hotels belonging to the corporation, resides here as at the head-quarters of his department, and is blessed every day by the flying guests from the railway-trains, as well as the permanent boarders who use Cumberland as a mountain-resort.  The choicest dainties from the markets of Baltimore, laid tenderly on ice in that city and brought as freight in the lightning trains of the road, are cooked for the tables, and the traveler “exercised in woes,” who used to groan over salt pork and dreadful dodgers, now finds the “groaning” transferred to the overloaded board.  The house is now in all the charm of freshness and cleanliness, hospitably furnished, with deep piazza, a pretty croquet-lawn with fountain, and other modern attractions, the whole surrounded with what is no small gain in a muddy Maryland town—­a broad Schillinger cement pavement, which, like Mr. Wopsle’s acting, may be praised as “massive and concrete.”

By day, Cumberland is quite given over to carbon:  drawing her supplies from the neighboring mining-town of Frostburg, she dedicates herself devoutly to coals.  All day long she may be seen winding around her sooty neck, like an African queen, endless chains and trains and rosaries of black diamonds, which never tire of passing through the enumeration of her jeweled fingers.  At night the scene is more beautiful.  We clambered up the nearest hill at sunset, while the colored light was draining into the pass of Wills’ Mountain as into a vase, and the lamps of the town sprang gradually into sight beneath us.  The surrounding theatre of mountains had a singularly calm and noble air,