In 1826, John H. Peyton obtained an appointment as cadet at West Point for his brother-in-law, John B. Lewis, of the Sweet Springs. As young Lewis was inexperienced, had never traveled beyond the limits of Virginia, Mr. Peyton determined to accompany him to the United States Military Academy, though the journey at that day was long and tedious and his professional engagements made his absence at any time a matter of great inconvenience to himself and clients. The following letter to Mrs. Peyton will be read at this day with interest and something like astonishment, so great has been our progress and development within the past sixty-five years--such changes would hardly have occurred in European countries in centuries. At that day the old-fashioned stage-coach was still in use, there were few macadamized roads and no railways. The entire journey, therefore, from Staunton in Virginia, to West Point, was made in what were called "hacks,"--most of them rickety and unsafe, and in steamboats no better, and not so safe as the Tug and Ferry boats of the present and as unlike as possible the floating palaces of our day. It must be remembered that railroads were not opened in the United States until 1830, and travel was somewhat in the unsatisfactory state described by Mr. Pickwick. "Travel," said Mr. Pickwick, "is in a troubled state, and the minds of coachmen are unsettled. Stage-coaches are upsetting in all directions, horses are bolting, boats are overturning and boilers are bursting." Such was true in no Pickwickian sense in our country in 1826, and the perils of traveling were increased by the use of high pressure engines on the boats, and unskillful drivers and bad horses in the coaches. There was not much improvement in things in Virginia since A. D. 1665, when Colonel Valentine Peyton, of Nominy, in the county of Westmoreland, Virginia, thus remarks in his last will and testament [See April number, 1881, of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register] before leaving home, "_being about to take a voyage to Jamestown and knowing the life of a man to be uncertain. I doe make this my last will and testament_." If a man were indifferent to such dangers, there was little pleasure to be derived from traveling. The taverns were miserable, and the rural districts almost destitute of the comforts of civilized life. Excitement there might have been in journeying then, but none of the pleasant exhilaration which attends a jaunt in a Pullman now-a-days. Mr. Peyton makes no complaints, though it is obvious from his description of a half-hour's "nap" on the Baltimore boat, that he had not stumbled upon a bed of roses. JOHN H. PEYTON TO HIS WIFE. New York, June 18th, 1826. _My Dear Ann_: