es) are the
Ohio towns to-day; and Dover (417 miles), Augusta (424 miles), and
Foster (435 miles), their rivals on the Kentucky shore. Sawmills and
distilleries are the leading industries, and there are broad paved
wharves; but a listless air pervades them all, as if once they basked
in the light of better days. Foster is rather the shabbiest of the
lot. As I passed through to find the postoffice, at the upper edge of
town, where the hills come down to meet the bottom, I saw that half
of the store buildings still intact were closed, many dwellings and
warehouses were in ruins, and numerous open cellars were grown to
grass and weeds. Few people were in sight, and they loafing at the
corners. The postoffice occupied a vacated store, evidently not swept
these six months past. The youthful master, with chair tilted back
and his feet on an old washstand which did duty as office table, was
listlessly whittling a finger-ring from a peach-stone; but shoving
his feet along, he made room for me to write a postal card which I had
brought for the purpose.

"What is the matter with this town?" I asked, as I scratched away.

"Daid, I reck'n!" and he blew away the peach-stone dust which had
accumulated in the folds of his greasy vest.

"Yes, I see it is dead. What killed it?"

"Oh! just gone daid--sort o' nat'ral daith, I reck'n."

We had a pretty view this morning, three or four miles below Augusta,
from the top of a tree-denuded Kentucky hill, some two hundred and
fifty feet high. Hauling Pilgrim into the willows, we set out over a
low, cultivated bottom, whose edges were being lapped by the rising
river, to the detriment of the springing corn; then scrambling up the
terrace on which the Chesapeake & Ohio railway runs, we crawled under
a barb-wire fence, and ascended through a pasture, our right of way
contested for a moment by a gigantic Berkshire boar, which was
not easily vanquished. When at last we gained the top, by dint of
clambering over rail-fences and up steep slopes bestrewn with mulleins
and boulders, and over patches of freshly-plowed hardscrabble, the
sight was well worth the rough climb. The broad Ohio bottom, opposite,
was thick-dotted with orchard clumps, from which rose the white houses
and barns of small tillers. On the generous slopes of the Kentucky
hills, all corrugated with wooded ravines, were scores of fertile
farmsteads, each with its ample tobacco shed--the better class of
farmers on the hilltops, the