52 SHEPHERDSTOWN, ON THE POTOMAC. 



a short lialf hour you might be in the woods that surrounded it, on 

 two sides. And such woods! I don't think I have ever seen any 

 other like them — so mossy, so flowery, and full of such merry brat- 

 ling brooks. It was many a day before I ceased to hear in my 

 dreams, waking and sleeping the rush of the brooks and the song 

 of the birds through the woods, or to smell the pines that grew high- 

 er up, on the Second Ridge, as it is called. Well, enough of Brook- 

 dale ! It is here only to account for the writer of these sketches. 



Like most Northern girls, I had listened to at first, and latterly 

 assisted at discussions of all sorts — only, in our family there was very 

 seldom any discussion about politics. My Mother having been 

 brought up in Virginia and loving it as she did, loved its customs, 

 its ideas and its institutions too; and my Father loved her far too 

 tenderly to allow any one even to question her ideas. He had been 

 a Democrat before he ever saw her, and had moreover lived long 

 enough in Virginia to have thrown off his prejudices ; he was quite 

 ready to believe that there might be at any rate two sides to a 

 question, as well as a place where people thought differently from 

 what they thought in Brookdale. I had consequently no sectionaj 

 prejudices. I had rarely heard North and South compared, and 

 though I had a sort of general idea that I hated slavery, still it was 

 more as a crime of which the whole country had been guilty, and 

 which we were gradually casting off, than as something confined to 

 one section. We talked of Massachusetts and New York and Vir- 

 ginia, but seldom of North and South. 



Such I was, so old and so wise, but thinking myself, I fear, much 

 older and wiser, as I travelled toward Shepherdstown one Autumn 

 afternoon, in the veritable old Hack, with my luggage on the roof, a 

 small handbag on the seat by me, and a much worn little edition of 

 Longfellow's Poems clutched in one hand. Until I was sixteen years 

 old Iliad had an uncommonly easy and comfortable life; no trouble had 

 touched me, and consequently I had been eagerly crying up, to my- 

 self and to others, the divinity of labor and of suffering. Alas ! the 

 suffering had fallen upon me, heavily — and I found it anything but 

 divine. If the necessity for labor had come with it, I think even 

 Longfellow could hardly have upheld me. As it was, the volume 

 had not been often opened during my journey ; which made the less 

 difference since all the most sustaining poems I had by heart. I had been 



