WEDNESDAY, September 18.  Come to Isaac Shobe’s for breakfast, and on to Parks’s for dinner.  Meeting in the afternoon at Parks’s.  John 3 is read.  On the way to-day Brother Hedrick and I talked over the interpretation we are to give the Lord’s words in the thirteenth verse of the chapter read this afternoon.  These are the words:  “And no man hath ascended up to heaven.”  I asked Brother Hedrick if Elijah had not ascended to heaven?  I quoted to him the very words recorded in the eleventh verse of the second chapter of Second Kings:  “And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.”  Brother Hedrick confessed that a first thought on our Lord’s words might lead the mind to conclude that there is a want of harmony between what he says to Nicodemus and what is plainly said of Elijah.  But he removed the difficulty from my mind at once by explaining the Lord’s words to mean that no one in his own strength or by virtue of his own power had ascended to heaven.  “Elijah went up to heaven, it is true,” said he, “but the horses of fire and the chariot of fire by which he went up, beautifully and impressively symbolize the Lord’s hand by which he was taken up.  And besides this, we read in 2 Kings 2:1, ’And it came to pass when the Lord would take up Elijah into heaven by a whirlwind, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal.’  Here it is plainly implied that the Lord took up Elijah into heaven.  And this falls in as a part of the great lesson the Lord was seeking to impress upon the mind of Nicodemus, the great truth that the Lord alone has power to lift men, through the regeneration, up to heaven.”  Stay all night at Parks’s.

THURSDAY, September 19.  We go to Stingley’s for breakfast; to Eliza Hays’s for dinner (still in Hardy County, Virginia), and stay all night at Gilpin’s.  We are now within sixteen miles of the Maryland line.

FRIDAY, September 20.  To-day we passed through what is called the Glades and Wilderness, to the Briery mountain.  A very lonely road; but the companionship of a man and a brother like George Hedrick makes solitude enjoyable.  Only those who have experienced the agreeableness of a bright, serene, calm and contented mind and heart, such as I find in Brother Hedrick, can ever realize the pleasure of such company.  It does seem to me that we can almost adopt toward each other the beautiful sentiment of love which Ruth expressed for Naomi:  “Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge.  Thy people shall be my people.  Where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried.”  We fed our horses and took breakfast at Smith’s tavern, in Preston County, Virginia; took dinner at Bransonville, and find ourselves here at Brother Jacob Thomas’s, where we are spending the night.