bears testimony to the same powerful and intelligent family.  As for the “Glades,” it is kept by Mr. Dailey in the grand old Southern style, and the visitor, very likely for the first time in his life, feels that he is at home.  It is a curious thing that the sentiment of the English inn, the priceless and matchless feeling of comfort, has now completely left the mother-country to take refuge with some fine old Maryland or Virginia landlord, whose ideas were formed before the war.  We have at the “Glades” a specimen.  In Captain Potts of Berkeley we found another.  This kind of landlord, in fact, should be a captain, a general or a major, in order to fill his role perfectly.  He is the patron and companion of his guests, looking to their amusement with all the solicitude of a private householder.  His manners are filled with a beaming, sympathetic and exquisite courtesy.  He is necessarily a gentleman in his manners, having all his life lived that sporting, playful, supervisory and white-handed existence proper at once to the master of a plantation and the owner of a hotel.  His society is constantly sought, his table is pounced upon by ladies with backgammon in the morning, by gentlemen with decks of cards at night.  Always handsome, sunburnt, and with unaffected good-breeding, he is the king of his delicious realm, the beloved despot of his domain.  We have left ourselves, in sketching the general character, no space to descend to particulars on Mr. Dailey; but he was all the time before us as a sitter when we made the portrait.  A stroll with him around his farm, and to his limpid little chalybeate spring, after one of his famously-cooked, breakfasts of trout and venison, leaves an impression of amity that you would not take away from many private country-houses.

[Illustration:  FISH CREEK VALLEY, WEST VIRGINIA.]

The affluents of the Little and Great Yok (so the Youghiogheny is locally called) are still stocked with trout, while a gentleman of Oakland has abundance of the fish artificially breeding in his “ladders,” and sells the privilege of netting them at a dollar the pound.  As for the wild fish, we were informed by a sharp boy who volunteered to show us the chalybeate spring, and who guided us through the woods barefoot, making himself ill with “sarvice” berries as he went,—­we were instructed by this naturalist that the trout were eaten away from the streams “by the alligators.”  This we regarded as a sun-myth, or some other form of aboriginal superstition, until we were informed by several of the gravest and most trustworthy gentlemen of several different localities on the mountains that there really is a creature infesting these streams supposed by them to be a young alligator, reaching a length of twelve inches, and doubtless subsisting on fish.  An alligator as a mountain-reptile had not entered into our conception:  can these voracious saurians, playing in the alpine affluents of the Mississippi, possibly be identical with the vast and ugly beasts of the lower bayous and the Gulf?  We leave the identification for some reptile-loving philosopher.