[Illustration:  CHEAT RIVERS NARROWS.]

At Grafton we have choice of two routes:  one, to Wheeling, leads us by the beautiful scenery of the Tygart, where the Valley River Falls are laughing and glistening all day and all night, and by the stupendous Bollman bridge at Bellaire, almost two miles long, to Wheeling.  But we continue on a straight course to Cincinnati, having promised ourselves to see the contrast between the City of Monuments and the Metropolis of Pork.  Grafton offers us the accommodations of another of the company’s hotels, where, as at Cumberland, we are daintily and tenderly fed.  At Parkersburg we find another superb bridge, over a mile in length; at Athens an imposing insane asylum, to take care of us if all these engineering wonders have deprived us of our senses; and finally in Cincinnati, just a day after our departure from Baltimore, the gleam of the Ohio River and the fulfillment of our intention.

AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A STRONG-MINDED WOMAN.

Extracts from a Journal.

November 1, 18——.  It is just three years to-day since I began to keep this journal.  I am so glad now that I persisted in doing so, in spite of the temptations that have often assailed me to throw it aside.  How else could I realize, bring home to myself, these past three years, strong and vivid as my remembrance of them is?  No effort of mere recollection could have preserved for me as this book has done a record of my struggles and failures, and of my victories.  Yes, I write the word proudly, victories, for I have been beyond my hopes successful.  How well I remember my dear mother’s distress at my queer notions, as she called them—­her entreaties, her tender illogical protests against my making myself “conspicuous”!  Dear mother!  I can see now that it was very natural she should have disliked and dreaded my becoming a “strong-minded woman,” for anything narrower than her ideas of a woman’s education and sphere one cannot imagine.  She was an excellent specimen of the old-fashioned mother and wife, and I believe sincerely thought her whole duty in life and the intention of her creation was “to suckle fools and chronicle small beer.”

Let me see:  yes, here it is at the very beginning—­November 1, 18——.  How faded the ink looks!  Let me read it:  “To-day I told mother I meant to attend a course of medical lectures:  we had a scene, and she called in Cousin Jane to reason with me.  How I detest Cousin Jane!  She is nothing but a mass of orthodox dogmatism.  Of course we quarreled over it, and she ended by telling me I was disgracing the family, and was no true woman.  Well, we shall see which of us has the truer comprehension of a woman’s sphere.”