"
One beauty of the trip that I suggest is that it isn't all the same. In
one place you get a fair country hotel, in another an inn, and somewhere
along the way you may have to spend a night in a private house. Also,
though the roads through Maryland, and the part of West Virginia I speak
of, are generally good, my experience of Virginia roads, especially
through the mountains, leads me to conclude that in respect to highways
Virginia remains a backward State. But who wants to ride always over
oiled roads, always to hotels with marble lobbies, or big white porches
full of hungry-eyed young women, and old ladies, knitting? Only the
standardized tourist. And I am not addressing him.
I am talking to the motorist who is not ossified in habit, who has a
love of strangeness and the picturesque--not only in scenery but in
houses and people and the kind of life those people lead. For it is
quite true that, as Professor Roland C. Usher said in his "Pan
Americanism," "the information in New York about Buenos Aires is more
extended, accurate, and contemporaneous than the notions in Maine about
Alabama.... Isolation is more a matter of time than of space, and common
interests are due to the ease of transportation and communication more
often than geographical location."
CHAPTER X
HARPER'S FERRY AND JOHN BROWN
Mad Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
With his eighteen other crazy men, went in and took the town.
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