ldlewild, August 8, 1859

Dear Morris : There is one class of sights upon a new railroad which are very interesting while their freshness lasts—the places that have been taken by surprise. On the line of the streak of lightning that was thrown over the Alleghanies by the Baltimore thunder-cloud of thirty-one million dollars, is a succession of far-hidden remotenesses—wild valleys, cascades, solitary shanties and mountain fastnesses—many of which were thought by the hunter, or by the pioneer settler, wholly unreachable by common thoroughfares, and, in fact, inaccessible to all visitings but the eagle’s, but which have been laid open, almost with the suddenness of a thunderbolt, and are now daily looked at from crowded freight trains and expresses, as familiar to the man in the locomotive as the signs of a street!