the broad Southern accent, and his utterance was usually slow
and hesitating, and his manner quiet and deliberate; but I had seen him
when his words came like a torrent of hot lava, when his eyes flashed
fire, his thin nostrils opened and shut, and his whole frame seemed
infused with the power and the energy of the steam-engine.

Educated for the ministry, in early life he had been a popular preacher
in the Baptist denomination, but at the date of which I am writing, he
was devoting himself to the care of his plantation, and preached only
now and then, when away from home, or when the little church at Trenton
was without a pastor. Altogether he was a man to be remarked upon, A
stranger casually meeting him, would turn back, and involuntarily ask:
'Who is he?'

Only five of the nine seats inside the stage were occupied, but as the
day, though cold, was clear and pleasant, we mounted the box, and took
the vacant places beside the driver. That worthy was a rough, surly
character, with a talent for profanity truly wonderful. His horses were
lean, half-starved quadrupeds, with ribs protruding from their sides
like hoops from a whisky-barrel, and he accounted for their condition,
and for the scarcity of fences on the highroad, by saying that the
stage-owners fed them on rails; but I suspected that the constant curses
he discharged at them had worried the flesh off their bones, and induced
the fences to move to a more godly latitude.

On the top of the coach, coiled away on a pile of horse-blankets, was a
woman whose skin and dress designated her as one of the species of
'white trash' known in North-Carolina as 'clay-eaters.' She was about
thirty years of age, and if her face had been bleached, and her teeth
introduced to a scrubbing-brush, might have passed for being tolerably
good-looking. After a number of preliminary cracks of the whip, and
sundry oaths and loud shouts administered to the 'leaders,' the driver
got under way, and we were soon jolting--at a speed of about four miles
an hour--over the 'slews' and ruts made by the recent rains. Shortly
after we started the woman said to me:

'I say, stranger, ye han't no 'backer 'bout ye, hev ye?'

I was about to say I had none, when Preston handed her a paper of
'Richmond Sweet.' Without pausing to thank him, she coolly stuffed
nearly a half of it into her mouth. My companion did not seem at all
surprised, but I remarked:

'You do not _smoke_, then, madam?'

'Oh! yas,