[Illustration: PRINCIPIO.]

But we must stick to our train, which carries us through the Red
Bank Cut to Ellerslie Station, where occurred the first accident of a
serious character which has happened on this road for eighteen years,
and which was due only to a willful violation of orders by an old and
very trusted conductor. At Ellerslie are the Edgemoor Iron-works of
Messrs. William Sellers & Co., where every known improvement in the
manufacture of iron is being tested and applied. The next curve in the
road shows us the meadows of the Shell Pot and the Brandywine, with
Wilmington in the distance. The Brandywine, famous in our history,
runs through as picturesque a valley as there is in America, combining
all that the climate of Delaware permits in trees, shrubs, vines
and flowers with the wildness and variety of the valley of the
Pemigewasset or the wild Ammonoosuck. In this rare valley are mills as
old as the settlement of the country, and quaint hamlets that seem to
belong to Europe rather than America.

At Wilmington the system of the Delaware railroads begins: it spreads
out over the peninsula of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland
like a huge left hand. The thumb touches Chestertown and Centreville,
the fore finger Oxford, the middle finger Cambridge, the ring finger
Crisfield, the little finger Lewes; and this hand gathers into the
main road every year millions of baskets of peaches, and millions more
of oysters in baskets and sacks, and crates of berries, and car-loads
of hardwood and lumber. Under the influence of these roads the sleepy
peninsula is beginning a new career.

We cannot go down the peninsula, so let us keep on to Baltimore,
pausing, however, for a moment as we cross Mason and Dixon's line near