business appearance, its inhabitants have found it a profitable place to stay in.  Port Deposit last winter, when the river was filled with ice from shore to shore and for miles in both directions, fissured and cracked and covered with mud, logs and debris, seemed on the verge of destruction; and it was easy to believe that if the river did rise suddenly the moving mass of ice, like some huge glacier, would sweep away all evidences of humanity, leaving behind only the glacial scratches and the roches moutonnees.  Overhanging the railroad is a very remarkable profile rock which has attained some celebrity, and is shown in one of our sketches.

[Illustration:  Port deposit.]

[Illustration:  Fort McHENRY.]

From Port Deposit to Baltimore the country is more rolling than from Perryville to Wilmington, and there are many picturesque points.  One could find at Gunpowder River and Stemmer’s Run several beautiful points of view, but by the time he reaches these places the traveler begins to get impatient for the great city, the terminus of his wanderings, which soon begins to announce itself by more thickly congregated houses, and roads cut straight through hill and valley, regardless of cost or the destruction of local charms of hill and dale.

[Illustration:  The British shell.]

If one were to judge by the streets, he would think Baltimorians lived only on oysters, for the new streets seem wholly built of their shells, making them very white, glaring and offensive to the unaccustomed eye.  But the attention is soon diverted from houses and roads, to the bay and to Fort McHenry, which lies before the town like a sleeping lion.  Few forts in the country are more interesting or have played a more important part in our military history; but all its military reputation is less interesting than the fact that whilst confined to a British vessel, one of the fleet unsuccessfully bombarding the fort, Francis Key wrote the “Star-Spangled Banner,” now a national hymn.  A bomb thrown into the fort at that time by the British has been preserved on a pillar ever since—­almost the only local reminder of the facts of the bombardment.

At Baltimore we leave the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, sorry to part from so good a road and one so important to the welfare of the country.  It is a link in the great system, and one kept very bright and well polished by its managers.  Their course has been to pay only a moderate dividend, and use the rest of the earnings to improve the road and its belongings, and to foster the interests of the people who use it.  Such wise policy must build it strongly into the affections and interests of those who live along it, and ensure its being each year a better and better-paying road.

Robert Morris Copeland.

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CHARITY CROSS.