nd had studied human nature to
some purpose. He described the condition of the poor farmers along the
river, as being pitiful; they had no money to hire help, and were an
odd lot, anyway--the farther back in the hills you get, the worse they
are.

He loved to talk about himself and his lowly condition, in contrast
with his former glory as a sub-contractor on the railway. When a man
was down, he said, he lost all his friends--and, to illustrate this
familiar phase of life, told two stories which he had often read in a
book that he owned. They were curious, old-fashioned tales of feudal
days, evidently written in a former century,--he did not know the
title of the volume,--and he related them in what evidently were the
actual words of the author: a curious recitation, in the pedantic
literary style of the ancient story-teller, but in the dialect of an
Ohio-river "cracker." His greatest ambition, he told us, was to own
a floating sawmill; although he carefully inquired about the laws
regulating peddlers in our State, and intimated that sometime he might
look us up in that capacity, in our Northern home.

As we approach Louisville to-day, the settlements somewhat increase
in number, although none of the villages are of great size; and,
especially in Kentucky, they are from ten to twenty miles apart.
The fine hills continue close upon our path until a few miles above
Louisville, when they recede, leaving on the Kentucky side a broad,
flat plain several miles square, for the city's growth. For the most
part, these stony slopes are well wooded with elm, buckeye, maple,
ash, oak, locust, hickory, sycamore, cotton-wood, a few cedars, and
here and there a catalpa and a pawpaw giving a touch of tropical
luxuriance to the hillside forest; while blackberry bushes, bignonia
vines, and poison ivy, are everywhere abundant; otherwise, there is
little of interest to the botanist. Redbirds, catbirds, bluebirds,
blackbirds, and crows are chattering noisily in the trees, and
turkey-buzzards everywhere swirl and swoop in mid-air.

The narrow little bottoms are sandy; and on lowland as well as
highland there is much poor, rock-bewitched soil. The little
whitewashed farmsteads look pretty enough in the morning haze, lying
half hid in forest clumps; but upon approach they invariably prove
unkempt and dirty, and swarming with shiftless, barefooted, unhealthy
folk, whom no imagination can invest with picturesque qualities. Their
ragged, unpai