Just across the Potomac from Washington’s birthplace is old Catholic Maryland of the Calvert Palatinate, settled almost exactly a century before his birth, and still rich in the names and traditions of that earlier time. The great width of the separating flood makes one shore invisible from the other, and the only means of communication are either the local sailing craft or the steamers that weave from side to side of the river and lengthen the voyage from Baltimore to Washington to a matter of thirty hours. Communication between Maryland and Virginia was almost as easy in Washington’s day, for the steamboats have an annoying habit of neglecting many miles of one shore or the other, and there are days when no steamer crosses the stream. A man living in one of the little harbors of the Northern Neck, being in a hurry to travel northward, found his most expeditious mode of travel to be a drive of seventy miles to a railway at Richmond. Shut in thus, the people of the Northern Neck have nursed their traditions and held hard by their old family names, so that the visiting stranger, if he have any touch of historic instinct, finds himself singularly moved with a sense of his nearness in time to George Washington and his contemporaries. The telephone, indeed, has brought these people into tenuous communication with the modern world, but he that looks out upon the sea-like flood of the Potomac from the mouth of one of its many navigable tributaries in the Northern Neck can hardly persuade himself that the capital of 80,000,000 people lies less than a hundred miles up stream. Washington the man seems vastly more real and present than Washington the city. E. N. VALLANDIGHAM. _Evening Post_, N. Y. FANCIES AT NAVESINK (The original manuscript of this unpublished poem by Walt Whitman, was sold in New York recently. Apparently it was never finished; which is to be regretted, as its few lines are in Whitman’s best manner. The scene is on the hill by the twin lighthouses at Navesink, N. J., near the entrance to New York harbor.--ED.) FANCIES AT NAVESINK--THE PILOT IN THE MIST (Steaming the Northern Rapids--an old St. Lawrence Reminiscence.) A sudden memory-flash comes back, I know not why, Here waiting for the sunrise, gazing from the hill. Again ’tis at morning--a heavy haze contends with daybreak. Again the trembling, laboring vessel veers me--we press through foam-dash’d rocks that almost touch. Again I, turning, mark where aft the small, thin Indian helmsman Looms in the mist, with brow elate and governing hand-- [Illustration] THE FIGHT AT DIAMOND ISLAND