but there was
a printing-office, at which a newspaper was published once a week. A
college had also been founded here; but it was yet in its infancy,
having not more than seven or eight students, and only one professor.

The price of labour in the vicinity of Nasheville was higher than at
Lexington. There appeared to be from fifteen to twenty shops, which were
supplied from Philadelphia and Baltimore; but they did not seem so well
stocked as those of Lexington, and the articles, though dearer, were of
inferior quality.

All the inhabitants of the western country, who go by the river to New
Orleans, return by land and pass through Nasheville, which is the first
town beyond Natchez. The interval which separates these towns is about
six hundred miles, and was, at this time, entirely uninhabited. Several
persons who had travelled this road, assured M. Michaux that, for a
space of four or five hundred miles beyond Natchez, the country was very
irregular; that the soil was sandy, in some parts covered with pines,
and not much adapted for culture; but that, on the contrary, the borders
of the river Tenessee were fertile, and superior even to the richest
parts of Kentucky.

On the fifth of September, M. Michaux set out from Nasheville for
Knoxville. He was accompanied by a Mr. Fisk, one of the commissioners
who had been appointed to determine the boundaries between the states
of Tenessee and Kentucky. They stopped on the road, with different
friends of Mr. Fisk; among others, with General Smith, one of the oldest
inhabitants of the country. M. Michaux saw, _en passant_, General
Winchester. He was at a stone house which was building for him on the
road. This mansion, the state of the country considered, bore the
external marks of grandeur: it consisted of four large rooms on the
ground-floor, one story, and a garret. The workmen employed to finish
the inside had come from Baltimore, a distance of near seven hundred
miles.

A few miles from the residence of General Winchester, and at a short
distance from the road, is a small town which had been founded but a few
years, and to which the inhabitants had given the name of _Cairo_, in
memory of the taking of Cairo by the French.

Between Nasheville and Fort Blount the plantations, though always
isolated in the woods, were, nevertheless, by the side of the road, and
within two or three miles of each other: the inhabitants resided in
log-houses, and most of them kept negroes, an