benighted, don't know the roads, is not well enough to ride further, and wants to know if you won't be so kind as to let him stay here to-night.'"
"Yes, massa, I'll tell him; 'twon't do no good, though, and he'll be almighty cross."
She went in, returned after a few minutes, seized her paddle, and began stirring before she uttered the words—
"Says yer ken go on to de store, he reckon."
It was after ten o'clock when the traveller reached the next house. It stood close upon the road, and the voice of a woman answered a knock upon the door, and, in reply to the demand, said it was not far to the store, and she reckoned they accommodated travellers there.
Finally, at the store, the traveller succeeded in getting admittance, was comfortably lodged and well entertained by an amiable family. Their kindness was of such a character that he felt, in the position of an invited guest, unable to demand and unwilling to suggest any unvolunteered service. There was no indication that the house was an inn, yet the traveller's experience left him little room to hesitate to offer money, nor was there the slightest hesitation on the part of the storekeeper in naming the amount due for the entertainment he had, or in taking it.
If the reader will accept the traveller's judgment of himself, he will assume that there was nothing in his countenance, his dress, his language, or his bearing, by which he could readily be distinguished from a gentleman of Southern birth and education, and that he was not imagined to be anything else, certainly not on his first inquiry, at any one of the plantations where he was thus refused shelter.
So far as this inhospitality (for this is, I think, what even the Southern reader will be inclined to call it) needed explanation, it was supposed to be sufficiently given in the fact that
