hillings; for
black silk gloves, and for one "Aesop's Fables," at a cost of three
shillings and ninepence.] The blacksmith charged six shillings and
ninepence for a new pair of shoes, and a shilling and sixpence for
taking off an old pair; and he did all the iron work for the farm and
the house alike, from repairing bridle bits and sharpening coulters to
mounting "wafil irons" [Footnote: _Do._, Account of Morrison and Hickey,
1798.]--for the housewives excelled in preparing delicious waffles and
hot cakes.

Holidays of the Gentry.

The gentry were fond of taking holidays, going to some mountain resort,
where they met friends from other parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, and
from Virginia and elsewhere. They carried their negro servants with
them, and at a good tavern the board would be three shillings a day for
the master and a little over a shilling for the man. They lived in
comfort and they enjoyed themselves; but they did not have much ready
money. From the sales of their crops and stock and from their mercantile
ventures they got enough to pay the blacksmith and carpenter, who did
odd jobs for them, and the Eastern merchants from whom they got gloves,
bonnets, hats, and shoes, and the cloth which was made into dresses by
the womankind on their plantations. But most of their wants were
supplied on their own places. Their abundant tables were furnished
mainly with, what their own farms yielded. When they travelled they went
in their own carriages. The rich men, whose wants were comparatively
many, usually had on their estates white hired men or black slaves whose
labor could gratify them; while the ordinary farmer, of the class that
formed the great majority of the population, was capable of supplying
almost all his needs himself, or with the assistance of his family.

Contrast of Old and new Methods of Settlements.

The immense preponderance of the agricultural, land-holding, and
land-tilling element, and the comparative utter insignificance of town
development was highly characteristic of the Western settlement of this
time, and offers a very marked contrast to what goes on to-day, in the
settlement of new countries. At the end of the eighteenth century the
population of the Western country was about as great as the population
of the State of Washington at the end of the nineteenth, and Washington
is distinctly a pastoral and agricultural State, a State of men who chop
trees, herd cattle, and till the soi