"After much parleying the doctor's desire for hog and hominy overcame
all his fears, and the club marched to breakfast. Here two servant
girls armed with long fans, fought a cloud of the famished varmints,
while the club swallowed hoe cake covered with a copious lather of the
flies of the season. At length our appetites or rather we ourselves,
were conquered, and retired in disgust, leaving our foes to bury their
dead and divide the spoils of war.

"Our host, who is a true gentleman from Pennsylvania, then ordered the
darkies to harness the span. After the inevitable delays which always
attend everything that the fifteenth amendments have undertaken to do,
we rode out to view the country; and we now congratulated ourselves
that our troubles were at an end, but they had but just commenced.
Our host had a lame hand, and the professor volunteered to drive;
our friends, the varmints, now confined their kind attentions almost
exclusively to the horses, which they butchered unmercifully. Oh, such
roads! Boys of New England, if you sigh for 'sunny' North Carolina,
go; go by all means, and you will return satisfied that old
Massachusetts, with all its east winds is a paradise compared with
what we saw in the 'old North State,' or in the 'Old Dominion.'

"But to our journey. The horses floundered through quagmires covered
in some places with logs, which toss and tumble you till every bone
aches, floundered and swam through streams reeking with scum from
the cypress swamps; the roads are about six inches wider than your
carriage, and the professor found himself obliged to avoid the sharp
corners of fences, on either side the deep ditches on whose very edge
ran the wheels; to urge his horses over stumps and fallen trees; to
whip them over long snouts of prostrate pigs who refused to budge an