--EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN.
Three States meet at Harper's Ferry, and the line dividing two of them
is indicated where it crosses the station platform. If you alight at the
rear end of the train, you are in Maryland; at the front, you are in
West Virginia. This I like. I have always liked important but invisible
boundaries--boundaries of states or, better yet, of countries. When I
cross them I am disposed to step high, as though not to trip upon them,
and then to pause with one foot in one land and one in another, trying
to imagine that I feel the division running through my body.
Harper's Ferry is an entrancing old town; a drowsy place, piled up
beautifully, yet carelessly, upon terraced roads clinging to steep
hills, which slope on one side to the Potomac, on the other to the
Shenandoah, and come to a point, like the prow of a great ship, at the
confluence of the two.
There is something foreign in the appearance of the place. Many times,
as I looked at old stone houses, a story or two high on one side, three
or four stories on the other, seeming to set their claws into the cliffs
and cling there for dear life, I thought of houses in Capri and Amalfi,
and in some towns in France; and again there were low cottages built of
blocks of shale covered with a thin veneer of white plaster showing the
outlines of the stones beneath, which, squatting down amid their trees
and flowers, resembled peasant cottages in Normandy or Brittany, or in
Ireland.
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