er towns.

Two miles farther down, on a high bank at the mouth of Fishing Creek,
lies New Martinsville, West Va. (127 miles), a rather shabby town
of fifteen hundred souls. As W---- and I passed up the main street,
seeking for a grocery, we noticed that the public hall was being
decorated for a dance to come off to-night; and placards advertising
the event were everywhere rivaling the gaudy prints of the floating
opera.

Meanwhile, a talkative native was interviewing the Doctor, down at the
river side. It required some good-natured fencing on the part of
our skipper to prevent the Virginian from learning all about our
respective families away back to the third generation. He was a short,
chubby man, with a Dixie goatee, his flannel shirt negligee, and a
wide-brimmed straw hat jauntily set on the back of his head. He was
sociable, and sat astride of our beached prow, punctuating his
remarks with squirts of tobacco juice, and a bit of lath with which
he meditatively tapped the gunwale, the meantime, with some skill,
casting pebbles into the water with his bare toes. "Ax'n yer pardon,
ma'm!" he said, scrambling from his perch upon W----'s appearance; and
then, pushing us off, he bowed with much Southern gallantry, and
hat in hand begged we would come again to New Martinsville, and stay
longer.

The hills lining these reaches are lower than above, yet graceful in
their sweeping lines. Conical mounds sometimes surmount them, relics
of the prehistoric time when our Indians held to the curious fashion
of building earthworks. We no longer entertain the notion that a
separate and a prouder race of wild men than we know erected these
tumuli. That pleasant fiction has departed from us; but the works are
none the less interesting, now that more is known of their origin.

Two miles below New Martinsville, on the West Virginia shore, we
pitch camp, just as the light begins to sink over the Ohio hills.
The atmosphere is sweet with the odor of wild grape blossoms, and
the willow also is in bloom. Poison ivy, to whose baneful touch
fortunately none of us appear susceptible, grows everywhere about.
From the farmhouse on the narrow bottom to our rear comes the
melodious tinkle-tinkle of cow bells. The operatic calliope is in full
blast, at Bearsville, its shrieks and snorts coming down to us through
four miles of space, all too plainly borne by the northern breeze; and
now and then we hear the squeak of the New Martinsville fiddles.