to clean the
floors. Upon my objecting to this, she flounced away, disgusted, I
presume, with my fastidiousness, and appeared no more. As I leaned over
the bannisters in a state of considerable despondency, I espied a man
who appeared to be the host himself and to him I ventured to prefer my
humble petition for a clean towel. He immediately snatched from the
dresser, where the gentlemen had been washing themselves, a wet and
dirty towel, which lay by one of the basins, and offered it to me. Upon
my suggesting that that was not a _clean_ towel, he looked at me from
head to foot with ineffable amazement, but at length desired one of the
negroes to fetch me the unusual luxury.

Of the breakfast at this place no words can give any idea. There were
plates full of unutterable-looking things, which made one feel as if one
should never swallow food again. There were some eggs, all begrimed with
smoke, and powdered with cinders; some unbaked dough, cut into little
lumps, by way of bread; and a white, hard substance, calling itself
butter, which had an infinitely nearer resemblance to tallow. The
mixture presented to us by way of tea was absolutely undrinkable; and
when I begged for a glass of milk, they brought a tumbler covered with
dust and dirt, full of such sour stuff that I was obliged to put it
aside, after endeavoring to taste it. Thus _refreshed_, we set forth
again through the eternal pine-lands, on and on, the tall stems rising
all round us for miles and miles in dreary monotony, like a spell-land
of dismal enchantment, to which there seemed no end....

North Carolina is, I believe, the poorest State in the Union: the part
of it through which we traveled should seem to indicate as much. From
Suffolk to Wilmington we did not pass a single town,--scarcely anything
deserving the name of a village. The few detached houses on the road
were mean and beggarly in their appearance; and the people whom we saw
when the coach stopped had a squalid, and at the same time fierce air,
which at once bore witness to the unfortunate influences of their
existence. Not the least of these is the circumstance that their
subsistence is derived in great measure from the spontaneous produce of
the land, which, yielding without cultivation the timber and turpentine,
by the sale of which they are mainly supported, denies to them all the
blessings which flow from labor. How is it that the fable ever
originated of God's having cursed man with the