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144 ) Mountain, which divides the branches of the Shenandoah, and ends abruptly on the south in Rockingham county. This is the Luray Valley—a beautiful vale branching off from and thence running parallel to that main gallery through which the troops of Stonewall Jackson marched in 1862, and where that warrior won his first

and imperishable laurels. It was terribly devasted at a later day by Sheridan.

The beauties of this valley have often been told. Nothing can exceed the loveliness of the Shenandoah in this part of its course. Straying by its banks, we watch the waters rippling under the mottled arms of the sycamores. There is the swell of turf and slanting branches on the hillside; the spaces of the deep blue sky, at which we look from the narrow vales jutting on the stream, are edged round with dark tree-tops; and beyond is the forest full of whispered mysteries, within which are the dramas of a thousand creations—the birth, life and death of unseen flowers. The picture must be badly stripped in winter. What differences, indeed, wrought by the seasons on all this "pomp of groves and garniture of fields!" Now tresses of newly-budded flowers hung up in the forest, now "honeycombs of green," and on the warm fields the freckled wings of the butterfly; anon the yellow leaves, and the owl's cry of coming winter.

A radius of about forty miles, sweeping from the Greenbrier White Sulphur as a centre, will describe a circle containing the most important part of the Springs Region of Virginia. Within this circle we have to the north the famous cluster of springs in Bath county—the Warm, the Hot, the Healing and the Alum Springs; the distance to the former measured by the common route of travel being thirty-five miles; to the east, the Sweet Springs, seventeen miles from the common centre; to the south, the Salt Sulphur Springs, twenty-four miles, and the Red Sulphur Springs, forty-one miles; and to the west, the Blue Sulphur Springs, twenty-two miles.

In leaving this centre of the Springs Region in any direction, we can scarce