own eastern counties. We passed through one wood, in height of trees, sweep of ground, color of soil, and build of boundary-fence, so exactly like a certain cover in Norfolk similarly bisected by the rail, that I could have picked out the precise spot where, many a time and oft, I have waited for the "rocketers." But the character of the landscape soon changed; loose, sprawling "zigzags" usurped the place of neat squared posts and rails; the stunted woodland stretched farther afield, with rarer breaks of clearing; and the low hill-ranges, behind which the watery sun soon absconded, looked drearily bare in the distance.

It was pleasant, from the ferry boat, which was our last change, to meet the lights of Philadelphia, gleaming out on the broad dark Susquehanna.

I can say little of that staid, opulent, intensely respectable city—not even if the imputation of dullness, cast upon her by the more mercurial South, be a slander; for the few hours of my stay there were spent almost entirely with my Asiatic friend, whose invitations and inducements to a longer sojourn were very hard to resist. But I was impatient to get on (as men will be who cannot see their arm's-length into the future), and at midnight I started again for Washington.

My recollections of that journey are the reverse of roseate. The atmosphere of the cars—windows hermetic, and stoves red-hot—made one look back regretfully on the milder inferno of the passage-boat; the acrid apple-odor was more pungently nauseating; and the abomination of expectoration less carefully dissembled. Besides this, I was afflicted by another nuisance, purely private and personal.

Whether there be any such thing as love at first sight or no, is a question—grave or gay, as you choose to discuss it—but, that instinctive antipathies exist, is most certain. I was the victim of one of such that night. Waiting for change in the ticket-office, my eye lighted on a dark man, of African appearance, standing unpleasantly near, and for a second or two I could not get rid of a horrible fascination, compelling me to stare. I say "dark man" advisedly, for it would have been hard to guess at his original color, unless his cast of feature had not given a line. Now, I have seen Irish squatters in their cabins, London outcasts in their penny lodgings, and beggars of Southern Europe in their nameless dens; but the conviction flashed upon me (and it has never since passed away), that I was then gazing on a dirtier specimen of healthy humanity than I had ever yet foregathered with. I believe that all the rains of heaven beating on his brow would not have altered its dinginess by a shade, nor penetrated one of the earthy layers that had thickened there; a thunder-shower must have glanced off, as water will do from tough, hardened clay. Rough patches of hair, scanty and straggling, like the vegetation of waste, barren lands, grew all over his cheeks and chin (a negro with an ample, honest beard is an anomaly), and a huge bush of wool—unkempt, I dare swear, from earliest infancy—seemed to repel the ruins of a nondescript hat. Whether he was really uglier than his fellows I cannot remember—I was so absorbed in contemplating and realizing his surpassing squalor—but the expression of the uncouth face (if it had any whatsoever) was, I think, neither ferocious nor sullen. There is generally a "colored car" attached to every train; for you will find the tender-hearted Abolitionist, in despite of his African sympathies, when it is a question of personal contact or association, quite as earnest in keeping those "innocent blacknesses" aloof, as the haughtiest Southerner. On the present occasion there was no such distinction of races. I do not think the contraband was conscious of the effect produced by his lordly presence; it was probably simple accident which brought him so often in my neighborhood; but, wherever I moved through the crowded cars, seeking for a seat, the loose shambling limbs and dull vacant eyes seemed impelled to follow. At last I lost my bete noire, and found a place close to the door with nothing but a low pile of logs in my front. I was tired, and soon began to doze; but I woke up with a start and a shudder, as a haunted man might do, becoming aware, in sleep, of the approach of some horrible thing. There he sat, on the logs close to my feet, in a heavy stertorous slumber, his huge head rocking to and fro, and his features hideously contorted, as he growled and gibbered to himself in an unknown tongue, like some dreaming Caliban. I arose and fled away swiftly from the face of my "brother," and, finding no other available resting-place, did battle on the outside platform with the keen night wind.

I am indebted, however, to that honest contraband for a curious sight, which I should have otherwise missed—the crossing of the Gunpowder River. There, the train rushes, on a single track, over three-quarters of a mile of tremulous trestle-work, without an apology for a side-rail, so that you look straight down into the dark water, over which you seem wafted with no visible support beneath. The effect is sufficiently startling, especially seen as I saw it, under a bright, capricious moon. From Baltimore, the cars were less crowded, and I encountered my dusky tormentor no more.

If there is much in first impressions, I was not likely to be enchanted with Washington.

The snow, just then beginning to melt, lay inches deep on the half-frozen soil; everything looked unnaturally and unutterably dreary in the bleak leaden dawn-light; and, as I drove down Pennsylvania avenue (after rejection at the lodgings to which I had been recommended), the first object that caught my eye was a huge placard: