full of mean company, who must be treated with as much respect as the highest, and so I treat them, and receive much coarse kindness in return. Kindness begets kindness; nor is it lost upon them. An Irish emigrant, said my landlord at Chilicothé, recently rode in the greatest possible haste all one night, to the land office here, to make an entry of a section of land uncleared, which pleased his eye. He foolishly thought there would be twenty other competitors {186} for it. He bought it, began clearing and fencing it, by hired hands, determined to have it all in cultivation immediately, as though it was the only spot to be bought and farmed in this empire of unnumbered acres, glutted and smothered in superabundance. Poor Pat was mistaken!
19th.—I started this morning at four o'clock in frightful darkness, darkness which might be felt, and over a horrid road; but with an expert driver, and good horses, we move on to daylight and a breakfast fifteen miles off. Here we met, at breakfast, the high sheriff of the county, a grey-headed, rustic, dirty-looking old man, meaner than a village constable in England, but a man of good understanding.
The uncle of my friend Cowen, one of the first settlers in Kentucky, during the Indian war, met a hostile Indian in the woods: both had rifles, and fired at each other at the same moment, but both missed. It was a war of extermination. The red man then threw his fearful tomahawk, which also missed. They then came to close quarters, rolling over each other, and struggling for the Indian's huge hog-knife, which had grazed along the throat of Mr. Cowen's uncle, who at length got the knife, thrust it into the belly of his antagonist, and leaving it in up to its hilt, set off to the fort for a party to despatch the dying
