In the old days before telegraph wires were strung all over the country, it took weeks to carry news to places far away.  There were no railroads, and the mails had to travel slowly.  A boy on a horse trotted along the road to carry the mail bags to country places.  From one large city to another, the mails were carried by stagecoaches.

When the people had voted for President, it was weeks before the news of the election could be gathered in.  Then it took other weeks to let the people in distant villages know the name of the new President.  Nowadays a great event is known in almost every part of the country on the very day it happens.

A BOY’S FOOLISH ADVENTURE.

The Natural Bridge has long been thought one of the great curiosities of our country.  It is in Virginia, and the county in which it is situated is called Rockbridge County.

The traveler is riding in a stage on a wild road in the mountains.  The road grows narrow.  Soon it is a mere lane, with high board fences and small trees on each side.  But the traveler sees nothing to show him that he is on the wonderful Natural Bridge.

[Illustration:  The Natural Bridge.]

The bridge that he is driving over is about forty feet thick, and of solid rock.  If he should go to the other side of the board fence, he could look down into a ravine more than two hundred feet deep.

When the traveler goes down into the ravine, he looks up at the beautiful curve of this great bridge of rock.  The bridge is nearly one hundred and seventy-five feet above his head.

Many years ago, when the writer of this book was a boy, he stood in the dark chasm underneath this bridge and looked up at the great bridge of rock above.  He took a stone, as all other visitors do, and tried to throw it so as to hit the arch of the bridge above.  But the stone stopped before it got halfway up, and fell back, resounding on the rocks below.  Then he was told the old story, that nobody had ever thrown to the arch except George Washington, who had thrown a silver dollar clear to the center of the bridge.

There were names scribbled all over the rocks.  People are always trying to write their own names in such strange places as this.  Above all the other names were two rows of mere scratches.  If they had ever been names, they were too much dimmed to be read by a person standing on the rocks below.  The lower of these two high names, the people said, was the name of Washington.  It was said that when he was a young man, he climbed higher than any one else to scratch his name on the rock.  And the name above his, they said, was the name of a young man who had had a strange adventure in trying to write his name above that of the father of his country.

The story of this young man’s climbing up the rocks used to appear in the old schoolbooks.  It was told with so many romantic additions, that it was hard to believe.