Journeying up the Schuylkill, we pass the flourishing manufacturing towns of Conshohocken and Norristown and come into the region of the "Pennsylvania Dutch," where the inhabitants, who are mostly of Teutonic origin, speak a curious dialect, compounded of German, Dutch, English and some Indian words, yet not fully understood by any of those races. These industrious people are chiefly farmers and handicraftsmen, and they make up much of the population of eastern Pennsylvania, while their "sauerkraut" and "scrapple" have become staple foods in the State. Twenty-four miles above Philadelphia, alongside a little creek and almost under the great Black Rock, a towering sandstone ridge, was the noted Valley Forge, the place of encampment of Washington's tattered and disheartened army when the defeats at Brandywine and Germantown and the loss of Philadelphia made his prospects so dismal in the winter of 1777-78, one of the severest seasons ever experienced in America. The encampment is preserved as a national relic, the entrenchments being restored by a patriotic association, with the little farmhouse beside the deep and rugged hollow, near the mouth of the creek, which was Washington's headquarters. Phoenixville and Pottstown are passed, and Birdsboro', all places of busy and prosperous iron manufacture, and then the river valley leads us into the gorge of the South Mountain. READING AND POTTSVILLE. The diminutive Schuylkill breaks its passage through this elevated range, with Penn's Mount on one side and the Neversink Mountain on the other, and here is located the most populous city of the Schuylkill Valley--Reading, with seventy thousand population, a seat of iron-making and extensive railway shops, having a fertile agricultural region in the adjacent valleys. This expanding and attractive city gives its name to, and obtains much of its celebrity from the "Philadelphia and Reading Railway," the colossal financial institution whose woes of bankruptcy and throes of reconstruction have for so many years occupied the attention of the world of finance. This great railway branches at Reading, and its western line runs off through red sandstone rocks and among iron mills and out upon a high bridge, thrown in a beautiful situation across the Schuylkill, and proceeds over the Lebanon Valley to the Susquehanna River at Harrisburg. This rich limestone valley, between the South Mountain and the Blue Ridge, is a good farming district, and also a wealthy region of iron manufacture. The Reading system also sends its East Pennsylvania route eastward to Allentown in the Lehigh Valley, and thence to New York. Factory smokes overhang Reading, through which the Schuylkill flows in crooked course, spanned by frequent bridges, and puffing steam jets on all sides show the busy industries. A good district surrounds Reading in the mountain valleys, and the thrifty Dutch farmers in large numbers come into the town to trade. The high forest-clad mountains