The antique character implied by the term old has
passed away from Martinsburg. It is now a busy, bustling
town, which daily raises its two thousand heads and
hushes its two thousand tongues to listen to the shrill
steam-whistle of the cars: but even this event, which in
the old time would have furnished so much food for
neighborly gossip, and street-corner harangues attracts
attention but for a moment. The hurry, the bustle, the
healthy activity which spring from trade, and announce
prosperity, commence:—and Martinsburg, thus absorbed
in her joyful present, scarcely ever gives a thought to her
past.

That past was as picturesque as the present is prosaic:
not only the manners and personages, but the town itself.

Standing on the hill to the southward, you had before
you a long unpaved street—Queen-street—which crossed
a low stone arch, ascended the rugged hill, and was lost
with its numerous trees and old mansions in the distance.
The stone arch—for it could scarcely be called a

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bridge—spanned a broad ravine which in the summer
and fall was bright with waving corn, and tall grass:
through this ravine, and under the arch, a little stream
gurgled over rocks covered with moss and saxifrages.

To the left was the church which had seen the men
and dames of ante-revolutionary days, and given a resting
place to many stately characters of long past generations:—
across the ravine was the German quarter of the
town, its substantial wooden houses half concealed by the
foliage from which light smoke-wreaths curled upward
against the blue background of the mountains and the
sky.

There was about the town in those days a thoughtful,
slumbrous quietude, which was very striking to such travelers
as stopped there: more especially if among such
travelers there were any artists armed with their sketch
books. All day long the atmosphere brooded like a
dreamless slumber upon the quiet borough, and the only
sound that never died away was the sighing of the willows,
which stretching down their long arms to the
stream unceasingly complained to the waves. All day
long the air was stirred by no other sound, unless it were
the sudden roar of the rock-blaster's mine echoing along
the stone-fenced valley. No stranger, except at long intervals,
made the stony street resound with hoof-strokes;
no cur ran barking at the pedestrian's heels. Such horsemen
and pedestrians were seldom seen—and the curs had
got out of practice. The cloud-shadows floated across the
streets, the tall old willows sighed and rustled, the corn
tassels waved their silky fibres in the gentle lazy breeze:
and Martinsburg might have sat for a sketch of Drowsyland.

Our story relates to this old Martinsburg—this land of
the dolce far niente—which is so completely a thing of
the past. But not wholly. The town was at the period
when these veritable events occurred, in the transition

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state. The habitudes and fashions—in costume, modes
of thought, every thing—were changing. The close-shaven
and prim expression of our own day and generation had
already begun to take the place of the bluff and joyous
bearing of the elder time. Powdered heads were going
out of fashion with fair-top boots and shoe-buckles and
silken hose:—the minuet, that stately divertisement in
which those honest old folks our grandfathers and grandmothers
took such delight, was slowly disappearing:—
stages had commenced running between the towns, thereby
realizing the long dreamed of luxury of a weekly
mail:—and Martinsburg with her sister boroughs was
enlivened from time to time by “professors” of music,
dancing, fencing, drawing, all the accomplishments, in a
word, which are thought necessary parts of education by
the inhabitants of a thriving country town.

It is at this turning point between the old days and
the new, when the nineteenth century, very nearly in its
teens, began thinking and acting for itself, that our history
commences.

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