stage. Sir John's Run was called after Sir John Sinclair, a
quartermaster in the doomed army of Braddock. The outlet into the
Potomac is a scene of quiet country beauty, made dignified by the
hills around the river. A hot, rustic station of two or three
rooms, an abandoned factory building--tall, empty-windowed and
haunted-looking--gone clean out for want of commerce, like a lamp for
lack of oil. Opposite the station a pretty homespun tavern trellised
with grapes, a portrait of General Lee in the sitting-room, and a fat,
buxom Virginia matron for hostess. All this quiet scene was once the
locality of the hot hopes and anxieties of genius, and it is for this
reason we linger here.

When the little harbor at the mouth of Sir John's Run was still more
wild and lonely than now, James Rumsey, a working bath-tender at
Berkeley Springs, launched upon it a boat that he had invented of
novel principle and propulsive force. The force was steam, and Rumsey
had shown his model to Washington in 1780. First discoverers of
steam-locomotion are turning up every few months in embarrassing
numbers, but we cannot feel that we have a right to suppress the
claims of honest Rumsey, the protégé of Washington. The dates are said
to be as follows: Rumsey launched his steamboat here at Sir John's Run
in 1784, before the general and a throng of visitors from the Springs;
in 1788, John Fitch launched another first steamboat on the Delaware,
and sent it successfully up to Burlington; in 1807, Robert Fulton set
a third first steamboat on the Hudson, the Clermont. Rumsey's motion
was obtained by the reaction of a current _squirted_ through the stern
of the boat against the water of the river, the current being pumped
by steam. This action, so primitive, so remote from the principle
of the engine now used, seems hardly worthy to be connected with
the great revolutionary invention of steam-travel; yet Washington