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

    “Aye those sunny mountains half-way down
     Would echo flageolet from some romantic town,”—­

did not my heart renew its allegiance to the poet who has made it lovely to the imagination as well as to the eye, and so identified his fame with the noble stream that it “rolls mingling with his fame forever?” The prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the fact that a great sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes him, sitting in the car, on its back, and swims across with him like Arion’s dolphin,—­also that mercenary men on board offer him canvas-backs in the season, and ducks of lower degree at other periods.

At Philadelphia again at last!  Drive fast, O colored man and brother, to the house called Beautiful, where my Captain lies sore wounded, waiting for the sound of the chariot wheels which bring to his bedside the face and the voice nearer than any save one to his heart in this his hour of pain and weakness!  Up a long street with white shutters and white steps to all the houses.  Off at right angles into another long street with white shutters and white steps to all the houses.  Off again at another right angle into still another long street with white shutters and white steps to all the houses.  The natives of this city pretend to know one street from another by some individual differences of aspect; but the best way for a stranger to distinguish the streets he has been in from others is to make a cross or other mark on the white shutters.