send a committee to inquire into the matter before remitting. Our friend was equal to the occasion and, when the committee arrived at his house, he showed them a strapping black woman who had been for many years in his family, and pointed to her as a living witness to the truth of his story. As the committee were not acquainted with domestics, they felt perfectly satisfied and, on their return home, they reported favorably of the affair, and the funds were sent. All he received for the use of the black myth, Munchausen immediately transferred to the Harper's Ferry relief association and the money and the joke contributed to the comfort and merriment of the real sufferers. On the 25th of November, 1877, there was a big and disastrous flood in the Potomac, caused by heavy rains in the valleys of both branches of that river. There was no corresponding rise in the Shenandoah, however, as the rains did not extend to any great degree to the regions drained by the latter. Harper's Ferry did not suffer much from this flood, except that the Chesapeake and Ohio canal, with which its interests are to some degree identified, was almost entirely demolished. That important channel of business has never fully recovered from the loss it sustained on that occasion, and, of course, the whole country bordering on it has been more or less affected by the depressed condition of that useful thoroughfare. On the last day of May, 1889, both rivers rose to an unprecedented height, but as the currents acted as mutual checks on one another, there was comparatively little damage done to property at the place, except from the filthy deposits left by the waters. This was the day of the famous Johnstown disaster and, while the people of that place were being hurried to destruction, the author of these pages was enjoying a swim in the basement of his own house at Harper's Ferry--not "Moonshine Cottage," however--the site of which will never be inundated until the gap in the Blue Ridge is stopped up in some convulsion of Nature that will topple over the Maryland and Loudoun Heights. He and his had retreated to the upper part of the house, as soon as the lower floor was flooded, but having forgotten to secure some important papers which he usually kept in the apartment now under water, he was obliged to strip and strike out to their rescue.