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.
Pages:
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111