The region where we now find ourselves among these mountain-tops is known as the Glades—­a range of elevated plateaux marked with all the signs of a high latitude, but flat enough to be spread with occasional patches of discouraged farms.  The streams make their way into the Youghiogheny, and so into the Ohio and Gulf of Mexico, for we have mounted the great watershed, and have long ago crossed both branches of the sun-seeking Potomac!  We are in a region that particularly justifies the claim of the locomotive to be the great discoverer of hidden retreats, for never will you come upon a place more obviously disconcerted at being found out.  The screams of the whistle day by day have inserted no modern ideas into this mountain-cranium, which, like Lord John Russell’s, must be trepanned before it can be enlightened.  The Glades are sacred to deer, bears, trout.  But the fatal rails guide to them an unceasing procession of staring citizens, and they are filled in the fine season with visitors from Cincinnati and Baltimore.  For the comfort of these we find established in the Glades two dissimilar hotels.

The first hostelry is the Deer Park Hotel, just finished, and really admirable in accommodations.  It is a large and very tasteful structure, with the general air of a watering-place sojourn of the highest type—­a civilized-looking fountain playing, and the familiar thunder of the bowling-alley forming bass to the click of the billiard-room.  Here, as in Cumberland, we find an artificial forwardness of the dinner-table in the midst of the most unpromising circumstances.  The daintiest meats and cates are served by the deftest waiters.  The fact is, the hotel is owned by the company, and the dinners are wafted over, in Arabian Nights fashion, from the opulent markets of Baltimore.  To prepare a feast, in this desolation, fit for the nuptials of kings and emperors, would be a very simple matter of the telegraph.  Altogether, the aspect of this ornate, audacious-looking summer palace is the strangest thing, just where it is, to be seen on the mountains.  The supreme sweetness of the air, the breath of pine and hemlock, the coolness of midsummer nights, make the retreat a boon for July and August.  In autumn, among the resplendent and tinted mountain-scenery, with first-rate sport in following the Alleghany deer, the charms are perhaps greater.

The other resting-place of which we spoke is at the Glades Hotel in the town of Oakland—­the same in which Mr. Willis quenched his poetic thirst.  Oakland, looking already old and quaint, though it is a creation of the railroad, sits immediately under the sky in its mountain, in a general dress and equipage of whitewashed wooden houses.  A fine stone church, however, of aspiring Gothic, forms a contrast to the whole encampment, and seems to have been quickly caught up out of a wealthy city:  it is a monumental tribute by the road-president, Mr. Garrett, to a deceased brother; the county, too, in its name of Garrett,