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There were no ladies: the trip being a fatiguing one: and we were
to start at five o’clock in the morning punctually.
I was called at four, that I might be certain of keeping nobody
waiting; and having got some bread and milk for breakfast, threw up
the window and looked down into the street, expecting to see the
whole party busily astir, and great preparations going on below.
But as everything was very quiet, and the street presented that
hopeless aspect with which five o’clock in the morning is familiar
elsewhere, I deemed it as well to go to bed again, and went
accordingly.
I woke again at seven o’clock, and by that time the party had
assembled, and were gathered round, one light carriage, with a very
stout axletree; one something on wheels like an amateur carrier’s
cart; one double phaeton of great antiquity and unearthly
construction; one gig with a great hole in its back and a broken
head; and one rider on horseback who was to go on before. I got
into the first coach with three companions; the rest bestowed
themselves in the other vehicles; two large baskets were made fast
to the lightest; two large stone jars in wicker cases, technically
known as demi-johns, were consigned to the ‘least rowdy’ of the
party for safe-keeping; and the procession moved off to the
ferryboat, in which it was to cross the river bodily, men, horses,
carriages, and all, as the manner in these parts is.
We got over the river in due course, and mustered again before a
little wooden box on wheels, hove down all aslant in a morass, with
‘MERCHANT TAILOR’ painted in very large letters over the door.
Having settled the order of proceeding, and the road to be taken,
we started off once more and began to make our way through an illfavoured
Black Hollow, called, less expressively, the American
Bottom.
The previous day had been – not to say hot, for the term is weak
and lukewarm in its power of conveying an idea of the temperature.
The town had been on fire; in a blaze. But at night it had come on
to rain in torrents, and all night long it had rained without
cessation. We had a pair of very strong horses, but travelled at
the rate of little more than a couple of miles an hour, through one
unbroken slough of black mud and water. It had no variety but in
depth. Now it was only half over the wheels, now it hid the
axletree, and now the coach sank down in it almost to the windows.
The air resounded in all directions with the loud chirping of the
frogs, who, with the pigs (a coarse, ugly breed, as unwholesomelooking
as though they were the spontaneous growth of the country),
had the whole scene to themselves. Here and there we passed a log
hut: but the wretched cabins were wide apart and thinly scattered,
for though the soil is very rich in this place, few people can
exist in such a deadly atmosphere. On either side of the track, if
it deserve the name, was the thick ‘bush;’ and everywhere was
stagnant, slimy, rotten, filthy water.
As it is the custom in these parts to give a horse a gallon or so
of cold water whenever he is in a foam with heat, we halted for
that purpose, at a log inn in the wood, far removed from any other
residence. It consisted of one room, bare-roofed and bare-walled
of course, with a loft above. The ministering priest was a swarthy
young savage, in a shirt of cotton print like bed-furniture, and a
pair of ragged trousers. There were a couple of young boys, too,
nearly naked, lying idle by the well; and they, and he, and THE
traveller at the inn, turned out to look at us.
The traveller was an old man with a grey gristly beard two inches
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long, a shaggy moustache of the same hue, and enormous eyebrows;
which almost obscured his lazy, semi-drunken glance, as he stood