tourist route and a holiday delight.

It is all very well for the traveler of the nineteenth century to
protest against the artificial and unromantic guidance of the railway:
he will find, after a little experience, that the homes of true
romance are discovered for him by the locomotive; that solitudes and
recesses which he would never find after years of plodding in sandal
shoon are silently opened to him by the engineer; and that Timon now,
seeking the profoundest cave in the fissures of the earth, reaches it
in a Pullman car.

The silvery Capitoline dome at Washington floats up from among its
garden trees, seeming to grow higher and higher as we recede from it.
Quickly dominating the low and mean buildings which encumber and try
to hide it in its own neighborhood, it gradually rises superior to the
whole city, growing greater as Washington grows less. The first
part of the course is over the loop of road newly acquired and still
improving by the company--a loop hanging downward from Baltimore, so
as to sweep over Washington, and confer upon the through traveler the
gift of an excursion through the capital. This loop swings southwardly
from Baltimore to a point near Frederick, Washington being set upon it
like a bead in the midst. The older road, like a mathematical chord,
stretches still between the first points, but is occupied with the
carrying of freight. The tourist notices the stout beams of the
bridges, the new look of the sleepers, and the sheen of the double
lines of fresh steel rail: he observes some heavy mason-work at the
Monocacy River. Two hours have passed: at Frederick Junction he
joins a road whose cuttings are grass-grown, whose quarried rocks are
softened with lichen. He is struck by the change, and with reason,
for he is now being carried under the privileges of the first railroad