reservoirs, and I would daily
go far afield in search of a well; but lately, necessity has driven
us to accept the cistern, and often we find it even preferable to the
well, on those rare occasions when the latter can be found at villages
or farm-houses. But there are cisterns and cisterns--foul holes like
that at Rosebud, others that are neatness itself, with all manner of
grades between. As for river water, ever yellow with clay, and thick
as to motes, much of it is used in the country parts. This morning, a
bevy of negroes came down the bank from a Kentucky field; and each in
turn, creeping out on a drift log,--for the ground is usually muddy a
few feet up from the water's edge,--lay flat on his stomach and drank
greedily from the roily mess.

At dusk, there was again a damp chill, and for the third time we left
the Doctor to keep bachelor's hall upon the beach. It was raining
smartly by the time the tavern was reached, nearly a mile down
the bank. Our advent caused a rare scurrying to and fro, for two
commercial "drummers," who were to depart by the early morning boat,
occupied the "reg'lar spar' room," the landlady informed us, and a bit
of a cubby-hole off the back stairs had to be arranged for us. Guests
are rarities, at the hostelry in Rome.

* * * * *

Near Ripley, O., Tuesday, May 22nd.--There was an inch of snow last
night, on the hills about, and a morning Cincinnati paper records a
heavy fall in the Pennsylvania mountains. The storm is general, and
the river rose two feet over night. When we set off, in mid-morning,
it was raining heavily; but in less than an hour the clouds broke, and
the rest of the day has been an alternation of chilling showers and
bursts of warm sunshine, with the same succession, of alluring vistas,
over which play broad bands of changing light and shade, and overhead
the storm clouds torn and tossed in the upper currents.

Our landlord at Rome asserted at breakfast that Kentucky was fifty
years behind the Ohio side, in improvements of every sort. Thus far,
we have not ourselves noticed differences of that degree. Doubtless
before the late civil war,--all the ante-bellum travelers agree
in this,--when the blight of slavery was resting on Virginia and
Kentucky, the south shore of the Ohio was as another country; but
to-day, so far as we can ascertain from a surface view, the little
villages on either side are equally dingy and woe-begone, and large
Southern t