It is a town in which to ramble for an hour, uphill, down and around; stopping now to delight in a crumbling stone wall, tied together with Kenilworth ivy; now to watch a woman making apple butter in a great iron pot; now to see an old negro clamber slowly into his rickety wagon, take up the rope reins, and start his skinny horse with the surprising words:  “Come hither!”; now to look at an old tangled garden, terraced rudely up a hillside; now to read the sign, on a telegraph pole in the village, bearing the frank threat:  “If you Hitch your Horses Here they will be Turned Loose.”  Now you will come upon a terraced road, at one side of which stands an old house draped over the rocks in such a way as to provide entrance from the ground level, on any one of three stories; or an unexpected view down a steep roadway, or over ancient moss-grown housetops to where, as an old book I found there puts it, “between two ramparts, in a gorge of savage grandeur, the lordly Potomac takes to his embrace the beautiful Shenandoah.”

The liaison between the rivers, described in this Rabelaisian manner by the author of “The Annals of Harper’s Ferry,” has been going on for a long time with all the brazen publicity of a love scene on a park bench.  I recommend the matter to the attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which once took action to prohibit a novel by Mr. Theodore Dreiser.  A great many people wish to read Mr. Dreiser’s books yet no one has to read them if he does not want to.  But it is a different matter with these rivers.  Sensitive citizens of Harper’s Ferry and pure-minded passengers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad are obliged daily to witness what is going on.

Before the days of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and of the late Anthony Comstock, when we had no one to make it clear to us exactly what was shocking, little was thought of the public scandal between the Potomac and the Shenandoah.  Thomas Jefferson seems to have rather liked it; there is a point above the town, known as Jefferson’s Rock, at which, it is said, the author of the Declaration of Independence stood and uttered a sentiment about the spectacle.  Everybody in Harper’s Ferry agrees that Jefferson stood at Jefferson’s Rock and said something appropriate, and any one of them will try to tell you what he said, but each version will be different.

A young lady told me that he said:  “This view is worth a trip across the Atlantic Ocean.”

A young man in a blue felt hat of the fried-egg variety said that Jefferson declared, with his well-known simplicity:  “This is the grandest view I ever seen.”

An old man who had to go through the tobacco chewer’s pre-conversational rite before replying to my question gave it as:  “Pfst!—­They ain’t nothin’ in Europe ner Switzerland ner nowheres else, I reckon’, to beat this-here scenery.”

The man at the drug store quoted differently alleging the saying to have been:  “Europe has nothing on this”:  whereas the livery stable man’s version was:  “This has that famous German river—­the Rhine River don’t they call it?—­skinned to death.”