The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1872-03-02

acknowledgment of another state and type OF
men. To this day the Delaware scenery, river
antitypes of the Schelde, the Mas, and the
Elbe =
"And up the river ride,
Borne on the slow and equal tide,
Above the level of the focss.
By many hook and dixie we slip,
By many sober sided ship,
By many willow islet's strip,
Set round with emerald splutterdochs' ~
Interior Delaware shows at Dover, be State
capital, queer little brick State-hou-e facing
public green, with the whipping post conve-
nient the Senate-chamber is not GER than
a comfortable bed room. At hand, in a. church
yard, John M. Clayton is buried under fine
marble tomb. The Legislators ere prepondera-
tingly farmers, honest, and jealous ofexpendi-
lures, but unequal either to the conception or
care of State all that political Delaware has
achieved is a good road system and no State
debt.
ii .he tourist Ieave E1KJOn oy Lue maryland
series of roads he will have better luck, plung-
ing almost Immediately into the land of peach,
ana in due time reaching the oyster realm.
Sasgafras River, a short halfday's ride due
southward, is to the peach culture what the
river Marne is to wine. Here the long tinted
orchards begin, and the landscape wears pink
colof lor the better part of fifty miles ensuing
The American peach is not a pretender, like
the American grape; it is native prince with
an old domain, growing in civilization every
summer, and the people who love the beauty
and sweetness of its sway are never required
to apologize for it. 1t is, to look upon, the very
velvet of natures loom. The bee which woos
it can make no honey like its flavor. At the
gathering time, when the roads are filed with
teams and the air with bouquet and the peach
es are stripped from the parent stem which had
groaned to support them, in all their ripeness
i II
with its low bluff banks and changing woods,
is also agitated with leaping perch, which make
the waters populous as the orchard, and the
game-birds of autumn begin also to twitter
when the tide is low. Then, in the twilights,
the laden steamers bear down the long coves
these thousands of caskets of unequaled fruit,
which drew its juices from such unpretending
soil, to give a taste of the Eastern Shore to
people in distant cities, soldiers in camps, and
bad boys who scale pantres for it.
Chestertown, the home of United States
Senator Vickers, is an old place, with de-
cayed college overlooking it, a loamy country
round, and a beautiful river floating off by
many manor houses to Kent Island, the first
colony on the Maryland shores of the Chesa-
peake, planted by William Claiborne, of Vir-
ginia, in 1929. Two other rivers, the st. Mi
chaels and the Wye, make up into the PENN
sula behind Kent Island-both wide short
fowl, and shell-ish. Kent Island has no ru-
ins and no town, but it is covered with pleaant
farms and fishing beaches. Many old parish
churches lie back from the rivers. AS the
country in its most stately period was settled
from the bayside, little can be seen on the back
roads, and as there is "neck" or cape every
few miles to cut off even the bay roads,
had better explore the region by means of the
Baltimore steamboats,, which ascend all the
cfra and now communicate with the inta-
rior by branch railways feeding the Delaware
main stem.
The Choptank River is the noblest water
course of the Eastern Shore; at the mouth
superb sound, curtained with islands, several
miles wide; farther inland network of coves
and deep creeks, to whose beachy margins the
lawns and orchards of fine old homesteads
slope. One can take double -barreled gun
and lie on any ofthe many sylvan capes reach
ing into this gray river, and bring the wild
ducks down from the flock as they fly over all
day to their feeding-grounds. The pike, perch,
and shell-fish are fine and plentiful here, and
we get the first view Of the mansGno, or long
necked clam, which lies deep in the sand at
low tide and pokes forth its succulent head
when the waters cover it, Easton, at the bead
of Threadhaven Creek,-a perfect ford, unex-
celled by any low-lying Danish or Swedish
marine landscapes,--is the largest courthouse
town in the region, and its county of Talbot is
said to contain no farm which has not YES
sel-landing within three miles, so pierced is it
with streams. At Oxford, a hamlet where the
Threadhaven enters the broad, gray expanse
of the Choptank, the Jay Cooke of the Revolu-
ton, spent the first years of his boyhood in
America
Cambridge, the county seat of Dorchester, is
called the most beautiful place on the PENN
sula. salt creek flows up behind it, bordered
with some of the snuggest old mansions of tim
Der and brick which could please an artists
eye. The hotels here are tidy and neat. An
old Episcopal church yard, surrounded with
mouldering grave stones carved with crests,
shields, and ciphers, suggests the fine old affec-
tations of departed society, and tho church
stands up in the dewy atmosphere buttressed
with delicate fiaments of ivy which wrap the
windows round, and give them the appearance
of crocEeted pinnacles carved in green. The
courthouse, jail, and other buifdings inclose
dell shaded with forest-trees, in the depths OF
which clear spring rises under an open DOME
The books of the court house are kept to this
day with conscientiousness and ele tance sur
prsing to visitors, and an hour spent in ex-
amining them, under the supervision of cour-
teous county officials, will give amusI ginsights
into provincial feuds Cambridge j, embow
cred in luxuriant shade, and the resident la
dies have high reputation for beauty OF face
and nature. In the back country are many
noble shipping estates, the great houses fire.
quently dilapidated or in ruins, and the low
islands which lie off the coast contain, per-
haps, the most simple and benighted people
on the Chesapeake, few of whom read, and all
"follow the water" for a livelihood. 1t is said
that Hollands Island is governed in intellec-
tual things by one man, who writes the letters
of the inhabitants, tells them the news when
it has got tolerably old, and informs them in
the deep abstrusities of politics. In this coun-
ty, at Indian Creek, some of the last Indians
of the Peninsula struck their wigwams toward
the close of the last century; and there are