r accommodation for ourselves and beasts. Three
or four smart young boys rushed out, to take care of our horses, and a
venerable old man invited us to honour his hearth. He was a Mormon, and
informed us that hundreds of farmers belonging to that sect had
established themselves in East Texas, at a short distance from each
other, and that, if we were going to travel through the Arkansas, and
chose to do so, we could stop every other day at a Mormon farm, until we
arrived at the southern borders of the state of Missouri.

We resolved to avail ourselves of this information, anticipating that
every Mormon dwelling would be as clean and comfortable as the one we
were in; but we afterwards found out our mistake, for, during the
fifteen days' journey which we travelled between the Sabine and a place
called Boston, we stopped at six different Mormon farms, either for
night or fore-noon meals, but, unlike the first, they were anything but
comfortable or prosperous. One circumstance, however, attracted
particularly our attention; it was, that, rich or poor, the Mormon
planters had superior cattle and horses, and that they had invariably
stored up in their granaries or barns the last year's crop of every
thing that would keep. Afterwards I learned that these farmers were
only stipendiary agents of the elders of the Mormons, who, in the case
of a westward invasion being decided upon by Joe Smith and his people,
would immediately furnish their army with fresh horses and all the
provisions necessary for a campaign.

One morning we met with a Texian constable going to arrest a murderer.
He asked us what o'clock it was, as he had not a watch, and told us that
a few minutes' ride would bring us to Boston, a new Texian city. We
searched in vain for any vestiges which could announce our being in the
vicinity of even a village; at last, however, emerging from a swamp,
through which we had been forcing our way for more than an hour, we
descried between the trees a long building, made of the rough logs of
the black pine, and as we advanced, we perceived that the space between
the logs (about six inches) had not been filled up, probably to obtain a
more free circulation of air. This building, a naked negro informed us,
was Ambassadors' Hall, the great and only hotel of Texian Boston.

Two hundred yards farther we perceived a multitude of individuals
swarming around another erection of the same description, but without a
roof, and I spu