A trip up the Shenandoah Valley, though made in a luxurious coach on a swift-moving train, is attended by innumerable reminders of the great civil war, for the journey is over a succession of hotly-contested battle-fields; but the beautiful scenery, rich lands, and lovely farm scenes that now compose the landscape, cannot efface the recollection which monuments and cemeteries constantly revive. General Boynton has drawn a truthful picture of this war-famous section, in this wise: “Every foot south of the Potomac was fighting-ground; every town was, at some time, the headquarters of well-known forces; nearly every farm house was a hospital, and some of the dead and wounded of the many contests had fallen on every acre. On the Union side Fremont and Sigel, Milroy and Shields, Hunter and Banks, Kelley and Crook, Wilson and Sheridan, and others of note had there met Jackson, Ewell, Early, Stewart, Ashby, and the advance of Lee in force. There were innumerable small affairs, and many extended and fierce engagements. Columns in advance and in retreat ebbed and flowed there through every year of the war; while every gap opening eastward poured its footmen and its horsemen upon the flanks, first of the one army, and then of the other. From the opening of the contest till is close it was the vortex of strategy. The war found it an ideal pastoral country, of rich and beautiful farms, of wealthy and aristocratic families, where life in its ease and sunshine rivaled that in older lands. It was the granary and store-house of the Confederacy. The war left it a bare, blackened, and blasted region, its homes destroyed, its farms desolated, and its able- bodied population decimated in the field. But it has fully recovered again. Grass and grain have woven nature’s beautiful covering over all scars of battle, and the countless miles of parapets are green each year with verdure, and the fields and orchards are laden with flowers again.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: HARPER’S FERRY, WEST VIRGINIA, FROM BOLIVAR HEIGHTS.—Harper’s Ferry is a place of great scenic as well as historic interest; but it is the magnificent scenery surrounding the place that now chiefly attracts the tourist’s attention. From Maryland Heights, on the opposite side of the Potomac, the observer is able to look into seven counties and across stretches of three States, the view being at last arrested by a soft haze that crowns the summit of the Blue Ridge range. The Shenandoah River unites with the Potomac at this point, sprinkled with white-crested waves that dash and roar over the boulders that uselessly attempt to impede its progress. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------