RETURN FROM PITTSBURG 303 



These accounts were repeatedly published in English 

 magazines, and the possible roads and opportunities 

 already indicated how these people could arrive thither 

 out of Britain, before the truth of the story was yet 

 established, which at the present time is regarded 

 doubtfully and with reason. 



From Elliott's, six miles this side Bedford, it is 

 eight miles to the Crossings, the road between steep 

 mountain sides which seem only to open to let the 

 Juniata through ; then over the Alequippe, a high, 

 precipitous wall, and thence four miles along a narrow 

 ridge or foot-hill overlaid with red whet-stone. On 

 both sides of this projecting foot-hill flows the Juniata, 

 and turns about the point (at Colonel Martin's) in 

 such a way that on one side the direction of the stream 

 is opposite to that on the other ; and at one place three 

 miles from the Crossings, where the distance across 

 the ridge is only half a mile, the river may be seen 

 flowing in both directions. We continued the way we 

 had come, over Crossing-hill, Rays-hill, and Sideling- 

 hill, and spent the night at MacDonald's tavern, where 

 the coffee is drunk out of tin-ware, there are potatoes 

 to eat, and straw to sleep upon, and a prodigiously 

 dear reckoning. 



Here we were introduced to still another domestic 

 tea-plant, a variety of Solidago.* The leaves were 



what the President of Yale College, in Connecticut, relates in 

 an address recently printed. That is, an inscription on a rock 

 at Narraganset in New England, having long been matter of 

 observation ; was during the last war copied and sent to an 

 Academy in France by which the characters were pronounced 

 Phoenician." Sit fides penes auctorem. 



* SOLIDAGO suaveolcns; foliis lanceolato-linearibus, in- 

 tegerrimis, acutis, subquinquenerviis, punctatis, glabris, tener- 



