In approaching Frederick, the singular beauty of its clustered spires struck me very much, so that I was not surprised to find “Fair-View” laid down about this point on a railroad map.  I wish some wandering photographer would take a picture of the place, a stereoscopic one, if possible, to show how gracefully, how charmingly, its group of steeples nestles among the Maryland hills.  The town had a poetical look from a distance, as if seers and dreamers might dwell there.  The first sign I read, on entering its long street, might perhaps be considered as confirming my remote impression.  It bore these words:  “Miss Ogle, Past, Present, and Future.”  On arriving, I visited Lieutenant Abbott, and the attenuated unhappy gentleman, his neighbor, sharing between them as my parting gift what I had left of the balsam known to the Pharmacopoeia as Spiritus Vini Gallici.  I took advantage of General Shriver’s always open door to write a letter home, but had not time to partake of his offered hospitality.  The railroad bridge over the Monocacy had been rebuilt since I passed through Frederick, and we trundled along over the track toward Baltimore.

It was a disappointment, on reaching the Eutaw House, where I had ordered all communications to be addressed, to find no telegraphic message from Philadelphia or Boston, stating that Captain H. had arrived at the former place, “wound doing well in good spirits expects to leave soon for Boston.”  After all, it was no great matter; the Captain was, no doubt, snugly lodged before this in the house called Beautiful, at * * * * Walnut Street, where that “grave and beautiful damsel named Discretion” had already welcomed him, smiling, though “the water stood in her eyes,” and had “called out Prudence, Piety, and Charity, who, after a little more discourse with him, had him into the family.”

The friends I had met at the Eutaw House had all gone but one, the lady of an officer from Boston, who was most amiable and agreeable, and whose benevolence, as I afterwards learned, soon reached the invalids I had left suffering at Frederick.  General Wool still walked the corridors, inexpansive, with Fort McHenry on his shoulders, and Baltimore in his breeches-pocket, and his courteous aid again pressed upon me his kind offices.  About the doors of the hotel the news-boys cried the papers in plaintive, wailing tones, as different from the sharp accents of their Boston counterparts as a sigh from the southwest is from a northeastern breeze.  To understand what they said was, of course, impossible to any but an educated ear, and if I made out “Starr” and “Clipp’rr,” it was because I knew beforehand what must be the burden of their advertising coranach.

I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday the twenty-third, there beyond question to meet my Captain, once more united to his brave wounded companions under that roof which covers a household of as noble hearts as ever throbbed with human sympathies.  Back River, Bush River, Gunpowder Creek,—­lives there the man with soul so dead that his memory has cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the same envelopes with their meaningless localities?  But the Susquehanna,—­the broad, the beautiful, the historical, the poetical Susquehanna,—­the river of Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the shores where