at the St. Charles, for all the fuss they make about it. It's lucky you'll have something better to travel on to-night than them French friterzeed Dutch flabbergasted hell-fixins: for you'll have the" (another most extraordinary series of imprecations on the road over which I was to travel).
Before dark all my companions left me, and in their place I had but one, a young gentleman with whom I soon became very intimately acquainted. He was seventeen years old, so he said; he looked older; and the son of a planter in the "Yazoo bottoms." The last year he had "follered overseein'" on his father's plantation, but he was bound for Tennessee, now, to go to an academy, where he could learn geography. There was a school near home at which he had studied reading and writing and ciphering, but he thought a gentleman ought to have some knowledge of geography. At ten o'clock the next morning the stage-coach having progressed at the rate of exactly two miles and a half an hour, for the previous sixteen hours, during which time we had been fasting, the supper-house, which we should have reached before midnight, was still ten miles ahead, the driver sulky and refusing to stop until we reached it. We had been pounded till we ached in every muscle. I had had no sleep since I left Memphis. We were passing over a hill country which sometimes appeared to be quite thickly inhabited, yet mainly still covered with a pine forest, through which the wind moaned lugubriously.
I had been induced to turn this way in my journey in no slight degree by reading the following description in a statistical article of De Bow's Review:
"The settling of this region is one among the many remarkable events
in the history of the rise of the Western States. Fifteen years ago it was
an Indian wilderness, and now it has reached and passed in its population,
other portions of the State of ten times its age, and this population,
too, one of the finest in all the West. Great attention has been given to
schools and education, and here, [at Memphis,] has been located the
