recalling the most enchanted days of Rome and the Campagna.  The curves of the hills are marvels of swaying grace, depending from point to point with the elegance of draperies, and seating the village like a gem in the midst of “great laps and folds of sculptor’s work.”  The mechanics and miners, as twilight deepened, began to lead their sweethearts over these beautiful hills, so soft in outline that no paths are necessary.  The clouds of fireflies made an effect, combining with the village lights below.  Then as night deepened, as if they were the moving principle of all the enchantment, the company’s rolling-mills, like witches’ kettles, began to spirt enormous gouts of flame, which seemed to cause their heavy roofs to flutter like the lids of seething caldrons.

The commanding attraction of the western journey is necessarily the passage of the Alleghanies.  The climb begins at Piedmont, and follows an ascent which in eleven consecutive miles presents the rare grade of one hundred and sixteen feet per mile.  The first tableau of real sublimity, perhaps, occurs in following up a stream called Savage River.  The railway, like a slender spider’s thread, is seen hanging at an almost giddy height up the endless mountain-side, and curved hither and thither in such multiplied windings that enormous arcs of it can always be seen from the flying window of the car.  The woods, green with June or crimson with November, clamber over each other’s shoulders up the ascent; but as we attain the elevation of two hundred feet above the Savage, their tufted tops form a soft and mossy embroidery beneath us, diminishing in perspective far down the cleft of the ravine.  As we turn the flank of the great and stolid Backbone Mountain we command the mouth of another stream, pouring in from the south-west:  it is a steeply-enclosed, hill-cleaving torrent, which some lover of plays and cider, recollecting Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s slumber beneath the crabapple boughs, has named Crabtree Creek.  There is a point where the woody gorges of both these streams can be commanded at once by the eye, and Nature gives us few landscape pendants more primitively wild and magnificent than these.

This ascent was made by the engineers of the company in the early days of railroads, and when no one knew at what angle the friction of wheels upon rails would be overcome by gravity.  On the trial-trip the railroad president kept close to the door, meaning, in the case of possible discomfiture and retrogression, to take to the woods!  But all went well, and in due time was reached, as we now reach it, Altamont, the alpine village perched two thousand six hundred and twenty-six feet above the tide.