fired, nor felt the ball. A fellow living near, who was seen to follow the traveller with a rifle, was suspected, apprehended, and tried for the murder, but as nothing, {200} save circumstantial evidence, could be produced against him, (which, however strong, will not convict here) he was acquitted. Public opinion, however, condemned him, and unmercifully pulled down his house about his ears, which we passed in ruins; and he accordingly fled, blackened and blasted, to another distant refuge in the wilderness.
I saw this day a party at cricket, and one man in a barn threshing with a flail, an odd sight here. Yesterday a gentleman, drunk, in the stage, drew his dirk, the common appendage of a Kentuckian. He had the stage stopped, jumped out and fought the other passengers, myself excepted. They dressed him soundly, disarmed him, and with the unanimous consent of the screaming ladies, left him behind, on the road, to fight with and spit fire at the trees.
25th.—A fine fat buck crossed our road this morning, the first I had yet seen. In the evening I reached flourishing Louisville,[64] a grand river-town and port of Kentucky, on the banks of and opposite the big rocky falls of the Ohio, here a mile broad; 700 miles by water and 360 miles by land from Wheeling, Virginia; and about midway between Washington city and New Orleans. The land here, and all round this town, and in the valley, to Shelbyville, is excessively rich and the finest in the state, but I fear is sickly to its inhabitants. Louisville must become a place of high {201} importance, if pestilence prevent not. Our hotel, called Union-hall, is very capacious and full of
