852. Stonington is about two miles from the most romantic point of the Potomac river; and Virginia spreads her wild but beautiful and most fertile paradise on the opposite shore. The Maryland side partakes of the same character, and displays an astonishing profusion of wild fruits and flowers. The walk from Stonington to the falls of the Potomac is through scenery that can hardly be called forest, park, or garden; but which partakes of all three. Cedars, tulip trees, planes, sumachs, junipers, and oaks of various kinds, shade the path. Below are Judas trees, dogwood, azaleas, and wild roses; while wild vines [ Vitis vulpina ?], with their rich expansive leaves and sweet blossoms rivalling the mignonette in fragrance, cluster round the branches ; and strawberries, violets, anemones, heartsease, and wild pinks literally cover the ground. The sound of the falls is heard at Stonington, and the gradual increase of this sound is one of the agreeable features of this delicious walk. A rumbling, turbid, angry little rivulet, called the Branch Creek, flows through evergreens, and flowering underwood, and is crossed a plusicurs reprises by logs thrown from rock to rock. The thundering noise of the still unseen falls suggests an idea of danger while crossing these rude bridges, which hardly belongs to them ; and, having reached the other side of the creek, the walk continues, under the shelter of evergreens, another quarter of a mile, and then emerges on the rocky depths of an enormous river; and so large are the black crags that enclose it, that the thundering torrents of water rushing through, over, and among the rocks of this awful chasm, appear lost and swallowed up in it. (Ibid., vol. ii. p. 4.)
