As we stood on the bridge surveying the scene, a decrepit and not very cleanly-looking old man, who was regaling himself with a use of tobacco of which the issues were visible around him, came up to have a look at the strangers. He knew every inch of the place; had been here all during the war. Sometimes the Secesh had it, and then the Federalists would drive them out; then the Confeds would take it, and so on. "There was pretty considerable fighting all round. See them hills? That one there had a Federal fort on top of it; that other one the Confeds used to hold." Why, he remembered old John Brown's scare as if it was yesterday. "Yes, sir! But they hanged him pretty smart! He and his people could make no fight of it when Uncle Sam's reg'lars came up." And in front of us were the walls of the burned armoury of the Government, and the name of the United States officer in command still visible over the doorway--the gaunt ruin, roofless, windowless, of a time which seemed so remote and which was not a generation gone by.
After our short stay there we went on to Hagerstown, where Colonel Kennedy, the President, and Judge Watts, one of the Directors, of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, joined us, after a divergence to the junction of the two rivers to get a sight of the country.
The Cumberland Valley is one of the most fruitful tracts in the United States. It presented in its substantial farmhouses, clean well-tilled fields and kempt fences, strong contrast to the untidy-looking farms in Maryland and Virginia on the road to Richmond; we heard that the soil had somewhat suffered from incessant cropping, and that the competition of the Western States is causing the cultivation of corn to be neglected. The towns appeared to be numerous and thriving, and the people well-to-do. It had been arranged that we should pay a visit on our way to a very interesting establishment, as it proved, at Fort Carlisle, and I give elsewhere a detailed account of what we saw in connection with a subject which appears to me to be of great, if somewhat sentimental, interest--the condition and future of the Indian race. The Duke's address to the Red children seemed to give them great satisfaction, and he said with truth that nothing we had seen since we had arrived in the United States interested us so much as the establishment where they were the objects of a philanthropic experiment, to which every one all over the world will, I am sure, wish success.