variety of charming scenery; or for a musing moonlight saunter, say in
December, when the Enchantress has folded and folded the world in her
web, it is by all means the course to take. Your staff rings on the
hard ground; the road, a misty white belt, gleams and vanishes before
you; the woods are cavernous and still; the fields lie in a lunar
trance, and you will yourself return fairly mesmerized by the beauty of
the scene.

Or you can bend your steps eastward over the Eastern Branch, up Good
Hope Hill, and on till you strike the Marlborough pike, as a trio of us
did that cold February Sunday we walked from Washington to Pumpkintown
and back.

A short sketch of this pilgrimage is a fair sample of these winter
walks.

The delight I experienced in making this new acquisition to my
geography was of itself sufficient to atone for any aches or weariness
I may have felt. The mere fact that one may walk from Washington to
Pumpkintown was a discovery I had been all these years in making. I had
walked to Sligo, and to the Northwest Branch, and had made the Falls of
the Potomac in a circuitous route of ten miles, coming suddenly upon
the river in one of its wildest passes; but I little dreamed all the
while that there, in a wrinkle (or shall I say furrow?) of the Maryland
hills, almost visible from the outlook of the bronze squaw on the dome
of the Capitol, and just around the head of Oxen Run, lay Pumpkintown.

The day was cold but the sun was bright, and the foot took hold of
those hard, dry, gritty Maryland roads with the keenest relish. How the
leaves of the laurel glistened! The distant oak woods suggested