HISTORY: The Heart of the Alleghanies, 1883, Blair County, PA Contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Judy Banja Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/blair/ _______________________________________________ THE HEART OF THE ALLEGHANIES. By George Parsons Lathrop Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. CCCXCIX. - August, 1883. - Vol. LXVII. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by Harper and Brothers, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. TWO hundred miles west from Philadelphia (it is 236 by rail) lies Altoona, in the lap of the Alleghany Mountains. Sooty child of the forge and railroad, it is cradled in one of the most beautiful among our mountain regions; for the county of Blair embraces, with Cambria and Clearfield, the finest section of the Pennsylvanian range, the true Appalachian summit. Thirty years ago the ground where the town stands was a farm; the huge station hotel occupies the site of what was then a duck pond, and would probably strike any of the wild fowl that might now return as a surprising development from their unambitious eggs. Mr. Wright, a director of the Pennsylvania Railroad, thinking that the extension of its line would pass through this spot, sent an agent up to secure for him the land owned by a Mr. Robeson, and wrote the agent a letter instructing him to offer $6000, but on a pinch to go as high as $10,000. Agent went up, called on the farmer, and prepared to get around to his subject in an accidental manner. But meanwhile, without knowing it, he had dropped the letter, and Mrs. Robeson, picking it up, had with exemplary energy read it. Taking her husband aside, she told him to ask the higher price. He made the sale on those terms, thus getting the first of that golden harvest which has since been reaped from his acres; and now Altoona is a city of 20,000 inhabitants, with several fine churches, commodious schools, two daily papers, a theatre, a heavy municipal debt, and other adjuncts of civilization. It still grows at the rate of 500 houses a year. The location there of the chief work- shops of the railroad forms the mainspring of local activity. These shops employ 5000 men - a number which, before these words get into print, will have risen to 6500. In those shops the locomotive is seen at every stage of its existence, from the germs up to the completed marvel when put together in the erecting department. An English travelling crane lifts the whole locomotive, in chains, and carries it along to the doorway. It is said to be the only crane of the sort used in this country, and moves on ledges in the brick walls of the building - a principle which the English builders thought impracticable until its feasibility was shown. There are few finer sights than that offered by the interior of these industrial caves - the silent moulding-rooms where delicate, thoughtful manipulation of sand that is to shape the fluid metal goes on; the huge steam-hammers pounding like an earthquake on stilts; the wheel foundry, in which 200 car wheels are cast every day, to be swung still glowing into the dry-wells of a circular annealer, like so many Thanksgiving pies designed for some festivity of ostriches. In a small building at the back two or three quiet men are constantly testing, by the nicest means of science, the materials to be employed in the works. The locomotive shops turn out 100 locomotives and 73,000 wheels a year, and embrace twenty-six acres. The car shops cover some thirty acres more, and produce annually about 100 passenger cars and over 9000 for freight: that is twenty-five freight cars in a single day. To the car shops is attached a yard containing 11,000,000 feet of lumber; and enough dressed lumber besides is always kept on hand to supply 500 cars, in readiness for hurried orders. Many graduates from the technological schools of Boston, Albany, and other places come to work in these establishments, which are democratic in their influence, and give encouragement to the best ability. From them some of the best 328 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. officers of the road have come. The general foreman of the car shops, Mr.John P. Levan, now a man of means, and directing 1635 workmen, began as a poor boy, and was the first apprentice of the company, at a time when the car-building force comprised only thirty-six men. In the lathe-mom I saw an elderly spectacled man in shirt sleeves, oily, begrimed, attentively superintending his machine; he had recently been the Mayor of Altoona. Having served the allotted time in the mayoralty, he quietly resumes his place at the mechanic's bench. To the west of the city is massed the main Alleghany range; to the south and east, Short and Brush mountains hem it in; and the valley running northeastward holds the infant current of the Juniata, blue in song, but in fact muddy. Hollidaysburg, the county seat, close by, was formerly the eastern terminus of the Portage Railroad, which received travellers by the canal route, since abandoned, and conveyed them over the mountain by inclines and stationary engines. The little town has become even more stationary than those engines now; but it retains a rolling-mill or two - enough to blacken the soil of the streets - and the county court-house is one of the few artistic public buildings to be met with in our rural towns. In the neighborhood are some peculiar formations, the Chimney Rocks. People are fond of getting up on top of these irregular stacks, where, in their black clothes, they might pass for the smoke of the supposed chimneys. A drive of six miles from Altoona, over the Devil's Elbow, and through a winding, thunder-splintered glen, goes up to Wapsononic, more familiarly styled by the natives "Wapsy." This is a projection of the mountain-wall, revealing from its lofty plateau a superb view. To the southward the uniform peaks of the Alleghanies jut out in regular succession. But perhaps the most striking relic of natural wildness will be found in the gorges, higher up the valley, invaded within a few years by the Bell's Gap Railroad. This is a narrow-gauge line which has wandered up into the rude highlands to search for lumber and the unexplored reserves of the famous Clearfield coal seams. But in its jaunty disregard of acclivities it becomes a rare exemplification of engineering skill. Within a distance of eight or nine miles it mounts to a point 2500 feet above the sea by a grade running as high as 207 feet per mile. At the same THE HEART OF THE ALLEGHANIES. 329 time that it ascends it curves without stint, and so sharply that the combined resistance of bend and grade amounts in portions to the equivalent of 220 feet straight ascent. This exceeds even the steepness of the Denver and Rio Grande road, which sometimes goes up a direct incline of 208 feet. At one point on the Bell's Gap line we found ourselves skirting the edge of a deep chasm which might measure 600 or 800 feet across; on the opposite bank, 300 feet above where we then were, another stretch of the road-bed was seen, chipped out of the hill-side almost at the sky-line; but although it was less than a quarter-mile away in a straight line, we had to wind through two miles and a half of sinuosities before we reached it. The bend is called Lightning Curve; more playfully, "Colt-shoe Curve." The upper extrem- ON THE JUNIATA. 330 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. ity is Point Lookout, whence you may gaze down the huge trough of a forest- clad gorge into the Juniata or Logan valley, eight miles away. All around is a wilderness scarcely broken, and mantled peaks are such strangers to human history that they have not even received names. At Point Lookout the train-men were astonished two winters ago by seeing a noble buck on the steep crest, a few yards above the cars. "Gunning" is still a pastime that means something in these regions. With the superintendent and two other gentlemen I came down the narrow- gauge in an observation car, at first attached to the rear of a moderately long freight train. The rapid slope of the track left us always higher than the linked coil in front of us, and at one moment the train lay before us distorted by the twist of three distinct curves, while the locomotive was just vanishing around a fourth. Then our car was uncoupled, and braked until the freight got two miles in advance, after which - brakes up! - we resumed the descent alone. With the speed of a swooping hawk we rushed down the inclines, around sharp curves, over web-like trestles, the mountains shooting up on one side; on the other, the deep valley rustling with leafage and yawning below POINT LOOKOUT. THE HEART OF THE ALLEGHANIES. 331 us. Coasting, tobogganing, and the ice-boat must take secondary rank when compared with this exhilarating ride; for here you have their speed and the excitement with less of danger, and, in addition, the accompaniments of summer weather, embowering leaves, beautiful gliding views, a cool breeze redolent of aromatic forest growths and sweet wild flowers. The Bell's Gap Mountains are peculiarly rich in woods; layers on layers of green boughs hide the piled earth as if they had been heaped there for a holiday. But the remorseless teeth of multiplying saw-mills are at work, and in a few years comparative desolation will have replaced the ancient glory of the hills. A link that joined Altoona to our national history at a vital crisis was the connection of the Rev. Robert W. Oliver, formerly rector of St. Luke's Church, and an intimate of Abraham Lincoln, with the abolition movement. Through Christian and humanitarian impulses he became the quiet agent of a line very different from but hardly less important than the Pennsylvania Railroad, and helped a number of fugitive slaves to freedom by the "under- ground" route. In the room over his study - still to be seen in the parsonage of Rev. Mr. Woodle - he concealed John Brown for weeks during one of the liberator's clandestine journeys. There is another link with the past in Sinking Valley, whence our Revolutionary forces obtained lead for their musket-balls during the early part of the struggle with England. The "sinking" refers to Arch Spring, which emerges from vaulted rocks, furnishing a mill stream that drops into the earth, reappears and vanishes several times, and finally is lost in a mountain cave, which carries it through to the Juniata on the other side of the mountain. How characteristic the names of this vicinity are! There are Roaring Spring, Warrior's Mark, Lower Number Ten, Fallen Timber, Shade Gap, Sabbath Rest - grateful sound this last to tired iron-workers and colliers. Sundry forges and furnaces have been dubbed after the wives and daughters of owners, so that we have Elizabeth Furnace, Olivia, Sarah, Rebecca furnaces, and the like, surviving in these smoky edifices and in the regular designation of post-offices. In Cambria County there is a spot known as "Hart's Sleeping." In early days Kittanning Path was the route from the centre of the State to the Alleghany River; and the beginning of the famous Horseshoe Curve indicates where the rails crossed this old path, by retaining the name Kittanning Point. John Hart, a German fur-trader, was the first white man who travelled the Kittanning trail, and he was accustomed during his journeys to stop at a given spot, where he and his horse could rest overnight. That is the origin of Hart's Sleeping." Altoona itself is a summering place on account of its excellent hotel, its high situation, its nearness to fine scenery, and the cool air that draws through the valley. But Cresson Springs, 1100 feet above, on the top of the Alleghanies, exists especially as a resort for the hot months. Bedford Springs, farther south and lower, is as renowned for its mineral waters in Pennsylvania as Saratoga is in New York, but remains still in a primitive state as regards accommodation. Imagine yourself transported 117 miles west from Altoona to Pittsburgh, on the western side of the great Appalachian spine, and you have the other end of a line along which are grouped resources of natural scenery, of wealth in coal and iron, and of metallurgic enterprise, which give to the whole district an exceptional combination of interests. Considered absolutely, Altoona is sooty, but its atmosphere becomes crystalline by contrast with the funereal smoke clouds of Pittsburgh, which produce in one's lungs a pneumonia-like irritation. The phrase "I have taken cold" may there be modified to "I have coaled up." Miles and miles of furnaces, iron mills, steel-works; acres of coal-laden barges, flotillas of hoarse-piping steamboats; a clank and din like stage thunder; dusky streets full of bustle where no one lives, and quiet outlying streets where everybody lives: such on a general view are the constituents of "Pitchburgh," as, with unconscious sarcasm, a darky car-porter called it. You see it well, or rather see how well hidden it is, from the bluff of Mount Washington, to the top of which you are hoisted by a steep incline about 300 feet high, and so nearly vertical that if you were borne up with your feet in the air, the sensation could hardly be more unpleasant. A man in a small glass cage at the summit works a couple of levers, which start the machinery and move one car up while the other goes down. He stands there like a mature spider, and 332 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. cranks his prey up at the rate of 2000 people a day. One of the most curious Pittsburgh industries is glass-making. Going to the door of a factory, I was about to walk in, when I saw a huge mass of something in a state of red heat come slowly down through an opening in the ceiling, swing gravely across, and then go up out of sight again. It went on doing this, and I thought it advisable not to go into a room where ornaments of that sort were in the habit of oscillating without regard to casual human heads. It turned out to be a big ball of window-glass, which a man in the room above was operating upon. He receives it from the melting furnace as a small knob of viscid fire, attached to the end of a long tube the size of a broom-handle. He rolls it about a little, trifles with it, and then applies his lips to the other end as if he intended to suck up the molten substance; but he is really sending air into it, and presently it begins to swell. Larger and larger it dilates, until it has become a big inflamed cylinder five feet long and two feet through. He goes to an opening in the floor and swings it to and fro to cool it. Then he sticks it into a fire to heat it up, then swings it again, all the time keeping the breath of life in it with his lips. Finally it is cooled, the ends are cut off, and the hollow, transparent, crystal cylinder is setup on end. The blowing and the heat must tell severely on the operative's strength. This particular one was tall and meagre: he had blown both himself and the glass very thin. Afterward the cylinders, having been cut all the way down on one side, and gummed, are taken to another apartment, where they are heated, flattened, polished, and sliced up into panes. This "cutting-room" is very dark and perfectly silent. In the centre is a circular oven with openings through which the several processes are conducted. When the polisher has finished one plate and is ready for another, he calls out in a sepulchral voice, "Turn!" precisely like the ghost of Hamlet's father with his "Swe- ear!" And straightway the revolving platform in the oven swings around thirty degrees or so. In the factory of Messrs. Atterbury and Co. spun glass is put into a loom and woven into a fabric of satin lustre and divers colors, with which mats, caps, and even an entire opera cloak have been made. There is something fabulous and yet nicely philosophical about the presence of this fragile, dainty work in the midst of the shock and gloom and rumble with which the bulkier, more uncouth offspring of forge and furnace are brought forth. Who says mythology is a far-off shadow? Was not Vulcan enslaved to Venus - rude force mated to soft loveliness? And do we not see the two extremes united again in dingy modern Pittsburgh? Mild meadows and low hills characterize Westmoreland, into which one escapes on coming eastward out of that populous crater at the head of the Ohio. But the farms in their turn are underlaid for twenty miles by the mines of the Penn and Westmoreland Gas Coal companies, the largest gas coal sources in the country. A little higher, at Johnstown, in the valley of the Conemaugh, we encounter the works of the Cambria Iron Company, which roar and flame proudly, as if aware that they constitute probably the biggest single iron and steel works in the world. The company employs 8000 operatives; keeps nine furnaces going at this place and four elsewhere; has perhaps eighty acres under roof at Johnstown; mines 700,000 tons of coal a year for its own use, and does annually a business of $18,000,000 or $20,000,000. It produced in 1881 45,000 tons of iron rails, and 120,000 tons of steel, saying nothing of steel springs in quantity, boiler iron, or the machinery manufactured for its own use. It is worth recording that eminent foreign mechanicians have admitted that at Johnstown three times the amount of work is done which would be accomplished with the same plant in Europe. In and out of the shops and all through the yards wind forty miles of track, on which trains loaded with ore, coal, slag, or hot ingots of steel are running every moment or two, eighteen locomotives being kept in use for this purpose, and several stackless ones for running into the adjacent mines. The steel ingots, by-the-way, are the largest steel castings made anywhere, excepting Krupp cannon, and weigh 5500 pounds each, measuring eighteen inches and a half square, and yielding eight rails apiece. The works were founded at this spot with the idea of utilizing the iron ore of the vicinity; but steel has now become its supreme object, and ores are brought from Spain, Ireland, Elba, and Michigan, to mix with the local brown hematites. The direct THE HEART OF THE ALLEGHANIES. 333 coal flame is not used in fusing the ore, but only the gases generated from coal. This intensified heat is stored in Whitworth stoves - immense iron- bound cylinders like chimneys, inside of which the temperature is 1700 degrees Fahrenheit. Thence it is distributed through pipes wherever it is wanted; but first the burning gases are passed through a receptacle charged with water, which actually washes the fire, so as to remove various constituents that might coat and injure the tubes through which it is conveyed. The calorific agent thus prepared not only supplies the furnaces, but runs the hydraulic and other engines, and is in part carried back to the stoves to begin over again. "So that," said Mr. Webb, the general superintendent, "we come as near to lifting ourselves by our own boot-straps as is possible." At Johnstown may be seen a 1000-horse-power engine making ninety revolutions a minute - something hardly attempted elsewhere; the sawing of rails, hot and cold; the puddling process; the Bessemer system; and the Pernot open-hearth method of oxidation. The most in- 334 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. teresting and impressive is the Bessemer, which decarbonizes melted iron in huge converters by forcing an air stream through it. First the silicon rushes out of the converter in a thick volume of orange flame; then the carbon, like white fire. When that is over, a rill of snapping, scintillating spiegel-iron is let in, to mingle with the pure iron that lies candescent amid its own radiations of peach-blossom-colored light; and afterward the perfected steel is poured into quarter-ton ingots as easily as if only cream-candy drops were being made. But when the converter is turned for pouring there is a rush of sparks clear across the foundry, arched like the rainbow and fiery as a comet. The effect is as beautiful as the whole work is fierce and prodigious. For the Pernot process the Siemens furnace is used, producing the most intense of all terrestrial heats. You look into a peep-hole of the open-hearth caldrons through a plate of blue glass - without that your eyesight would be extinguished - and see the iron there melted into a dead white wrinkled semi-liquid, which has precisely the appearance of a snow-drift. Finally the product is tested: how thoroughly may be judged when it is mentioned that steel for the Brooklyn Bridge was required to bend double in inch-square rods without breaking. The Cambria Company's monster has literally eaten up one side of a hill; the ground on which it stands is all undermined, and the pith of another hill across the Conemaugh is gradually being drawn out by the miner's pick. A tine library in a charmingly designed building is placed at the service of the mechanics by their employers; but Johnstown itself is a OLD PORTAGE ROAD, NEAR CRESSON. THE HEART OF THE ALLEGHANIES. 335 dispiriting borough, shabby and dirty. Darkness and desolation are apt to spread where manufacture gets a foot-hold; but the factories themselves are grandly elemental enough to compensate. It is more in the streets and houses of the working people that the need of beauty is felt, to overcome the discord which the works bring into the picturesque highlands. The single-file fires of the coke-burners here and there continue the long chain of labor stretching from Pittsburgh to Altoona through the heights of Cambria, which is termed the "mountain county" of Pennsylvania, and in fact bestrides the crown of the ridge. Cambria has always been a thoroughfare. It contained the head of canoe navigation, and the old Indian trails converged there. Civilization has followed almost exactly the print of the moccasin in the State highway, and the Portage Railroad, and later in the Pennsylvania Railroad. In summer and autumn the east-going track of this line is covered with a low green growth, while the west-going track shows only the cracked stone of the "ballast." The rea- COKE OVENS. 336 HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. HOUSE AND CHAPEL OF PRINCE GALITZIN. son of this is that trains from the West drop stray grains of wheat all along, which spring up among the stones. Birds from the neighboring woods make this granary a feeding ground, and even wild turkeys have been seen there snatching a hasty meal between two trains. Could there be a prettier piece of unconscious poetry than this in the midst of prosaic trafficking? Some of the poorer dwellers along the route emulate the birds by collecting coal that drops from the freight cars like the grain, and many get their whole fuel supply from these crumbs of the rich man's table. Sitting on the cool verandas of the Mountain House at Cresson, of a July dusk, the tourist or the resting man of business sees a line of a hundred cars, with the tawny flare of locomotive fires at either end, carrying toward the sea the food of nations; or hears, perhaps, like the sound of a population on the march, the low, heavy rumble of wheels that are bearing immigrants to their still uncreated homes. He listens, in fine, to one of the pulse-beats of the world. Characteristically American, a hotel has reared itself at the very summit of the mountain chain, on a scale commensurate with the country and with the industries we have glanced at. But it is not an ordinary hotel, and its origin deserves notice. An eccentric man of genius, Dr. H. M. S. Jackson. who practiced in Cambria County, conceived the idea of making a sanitarium at this spot. Many years ago he published a singular book, now rare, entitled The Mountain, crammed with all manner of learning - medical, mythological, antiquarian, meteorological - even describing the fauna and flora of the district which had so enraptured him. Originality and insight burst through his involved style like the fragrant gum from a pine-tree. His dominant idea was that mankind should touch the earth, like Antaeus, to renew its strength, and that the place of all others to do this at was Cresson, which is twenty-three hundred feet above the sea, cool in summer, even as to climate, and has less rain-fall than the slope Atlanticward, presenting in this way a temperate balminess without too much humidity. He also laid great stress on the soothing effect of natural beauty. But Antaeus was the son of Poseidon, who per- THE HEART OF THE ALLEGHANIES. 337 sonifies the regenerative power of water, and at Cresson this power was supplied in the form of springs. So the doctor started his hotel. "Not for wine-bibbers, sensual and profane persons," he declares, "not for the gross and godless, not for seekers and lovers of pleasure alone, was it to be provided, but for the sick and suffering, the mournful wanderer's in the pain-world." It was likewise to be a home for the broken-hearted, the wise, the gentle, the cultivated. The choice of locality was justified by the success of the hostelry; though that dream cherished by the "Aesculapian regenerator," as he humorously styled himself, of establishing with it a library, museum, and observatory, has never been carried out. Charles Dickens is said to have halted at the inn during his first American tour; and Sumner, when disabled by Preston Brooks, had recourse to its healing air and the skill of Dr. Jackson, who, besides being a brilliant converser, was a man of solid professional attainments. The hotel has been transferred to a better site, and within a year or two the railroad company, by expending upon it a quarter of a million dollars and a good deal of judgment, has made it one of the finest of its order. Fortunately its architecture and ornamentation belong to the new revival of good taste, the creed of redwood shingle and olive green, so that it harmonizes with the landscape. The geology of the mountains imparts a variety to the Cresson springs. Some, flowing from sand and shale, are filtered into absolute purity, and store up four or five hundred thousand gallons of a delicious beverage for the summer visitors. Others, issuing from calcareous layers or the carbon series, are strongly mineral, notably the iron and alum springs. Dr. Jackson gave them fanciful names, which have not been kept - Rhododendron, Calxation, Discord, Brandy Spring - this last being "from the generous flow of that beverage which occurred at the time of its discovery." Another, Ignatius Spring, commemorates "old Ig. Adams," a hunter who lived near it and grew to be a centenarian, presumably by the aid of its waters. A few miles from the Mountain House and its cottages the village of Loretto stands, in a small tract of farms surrounded by the ever-waiting forest, as a humble monument to Prince Dmitri Galitzin, who came thither as a priest in 1799. His name, which also survives in the neighboring town of Gallitzin, is well known; but outside of his Church the story of his self- sacrificing life is not well enough remembered. Travelling as a young man PRINCE GALITZIN'S TOMB. 338 HARPERS NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. in America for the purpose of enlarging his experience, he became a convert to Catholicism, and entered its ministry. Prospects of preferment at home were resigned, and for a time he even forfeited his revenues by this step. But he entered on his mission work in the then savage wilderness of the Allegheny slopes with extraordinary zeal, and a humility that resented any allusion to his aristocratic birth. He not only performed the severe duty of holding services in widely sundered hamlets, but bought and sold lands as agent to promote colonization, gave much in charity, and acted as arbiter in neighbors' disputes. He founded Loretto, which is a Catholic town, and now contains a convent of the Sisters of Mercy, St. Aloysius, who conduct a flourishing school there. There is also a boys' school carried on by priests. The only representative of commerce in Loretto is an emporium announced as "The Omnifarious Store, Established 1837." Ebensburg, near by, was settled by Welsh Dissenters. Thirty years ago Cymric was heard commonly on the street, and the Welsh women walked about with babies on their backs, knitting while they walked. But Father Galitzin was always on good terms with the Welsh pastor, Mr. Roberts, and they were wont to talk over their respective flocks together. The mission priest was a stanch Federalist in ALLEGRIPPUS RAVINE. THE HEART OF THE ALLEGHANIES. 339 polities, though his people were Republicans, and he maintained a correspondence with Clay, who was his friend. He seems to have exercised unusual privileges, and to have been, though quiet and kindly, a trifle autocratic. Hostile to display in dress, he made his parishioners conform to a simple standard. Once, when a woman came to church in a low-necked gown, the father, singing asperges and sprinkling the congregation with holy water, dashed a liberal supply of the liquid over her unprotected bosom, and passed grimly on. He remained in charge of the parish nearly half a century, refusing various bishoprics, and dying as a simple mission priest in 1840. There remain the lonely tomb, a big brick church, the two schools, and the old weather-stained barn which served him for a church, together with a straggling village in the midst of a silent, austere mountain-land. The material results of that life are not overpowering, but somehow the spirit of the prince-priest can not be got out of the air of the place. East of Cresson a profound ravine breaks its way wildly from the heart of the mountain to the lower valleys. It has acquired the name of Allegrippus, from an engine which fell over a fifty-foot embankment there thirty years since. The driver was Thomas Ridley, who still commands one of the Pennsylvania's locomotives. During the riots of 1877 an attempt was made to capture his engine, but he particularly insisted on running it without the aid of the mob, and it happened soon afterward that the company presented him with a gold watch and chain. Thus the man of simple fidelity in a mechanical trust continues to guide across the mountain thousands of passengers who never hear of him, close by the village where a man faithful to his spiritual trust lived, suffered, served, and passed assay. The mountain range has its share in affecting winds, and ought likewise to have some influence on character. Amid the conflicting currents of change it remains steadfast, full of recuperative virtue and delightful harborage for repose. All the mighty human energies that have burrowed into and under it here and there do not essentially affect its primeval solitude and freshness. One may ramble along the ridges, from either side of which rills flow away to reach the Susquehanna or the Ohio, on the very dividing hum of two vast, populous tracts of States, and close to the busy rails, yet may remain surrounded by forests of hemlock, oak, chestnut, tulip-trees, cucumber-trees, wild cherry, and forked pine. Nature in her grandest, most austere, yet most beneficent mood, man in his most indomitable one, meet at this crossing. What they teach ought to impress the flying atoms of the nation that daily are driven as by a wind-blast through the heart of the Alleghanies. THE OMNIFARIOUS STORE.