, but seek a farm, and have a feast
before parting company. We learned from a negro, that we were in a
place called Lost Prairie, and that ten minutes' ride down the bank of
the stream would carry us to Captain Finn's plantation. We received
this news with wild glee, for Finn was a celebrated character, one whose
life was so full of strange adventures in the wilderness, that it would
fill volumes with hairbreadth encounter and events of thrilling
interest.

Captain Finn received us with a cordial welcome, for unbounded
hospitality is the invariable characteristic of the older cotton
planters. A great traveller himself, he knew the necessities of a
travelling life, and, before conducting us to the mansion, he guided us
to the stables, where eight intelligent slaves, taking our horses,
rubbed them down before our eyes, and gave them a plentiful supply of
fodder and a bed of _fresh_ straw.

"That will do till they are cool," said our kind host; "tonight they
will have their grain and water; let us now go to the old woman and see
what she can give us for supper."

A circumstance worthy of remark is, that, in the western states, a
husband always calls his wife the old woman, and she calls him the old
man, no matter how young the couple may be. I have often heard men of
twenty-five sending their slaves upon some errand "to the old woman,"
who was not probably more than eighteen years old. A boy of ten years
calls his parents in the same way. "How far to Little Rock?" I once
asked of a little urchin; "I don't know," answered he, "but the old ones
will tell you." A few yards farther I met the "old ones;" they were
both young people, not much more than twenty.

In Mrs Finn we found a stout and plump farmer's wife, but she was a
lady in her manners. Born in the wilderness, the daughter of one bold
pioneer and married to another, she had never seen anything but woods,
cane-brakes, cotton, and negroes, and yet, in her kindness and
hospitality, she displayed a refinement of feeling and good breeding.
She was daughter of the celebrated Daniel Boone, a name which has
acquired a reputation even in Europe. She immediately ransacked her
pantry, her hen-roost, and garden, and when we returned from the
cotton-mill, to which our host, in his farmer's pride, had conducted us.
[We found upon] an immense table, a meal which would have satisfied
fifty of those voracious Bostonians whom we had met with the day before
at the _table