re traveling. Boone,
the county seat of Watauga County, was our destination, and, ever since
morning, the guideboards and the trend of the roads had notified us that
everything in this region tends towards Boone as a center of interest.
The simple ingenuity of some of the guide-boards impressed us. If, on
coming to a fork, the traveler was to turn to the right, the sign read,

To BOONE 10 M.
If he was to go to the left, it read, .M 01 ENOOB oT

A short ride of nine miles, on an ascending road, through an open,
unfenced forest region, brought us long before sundown to this capital.
When we had ridden into its single street, which wanders over gentle
hills, and landed at the most promising of the taverns, the Friend
informed his comrade that Boone was 3250 feet above Albemarle Sound, and
believed by its inhabitants to be the highest village east of the
Rocky Mountains. The Professor said that it might be so, but it was a
God-forsaken place. Its inhabitants numbered perhaps two hundred and
fifty, a few of them colored. It had a gaunt, shaky court-house and
jail, a store or two, and two taverns. The two taverns are needed to
accommodate the judges and lawyers and their clients during the session
of the court. The court is the only excitement and the only amusement.
It is the event from which other events date. Everybody in the county
knows exactly when court sits, and when court breaks. During the session
the whole county is practically in Boone, men, women, and children.
They camp there, they attend the trials, they take sides; half of
them, perhaps, are witnesses, for the region is litigious, and the
neighborhood quarrels are entered into with spirit. To be fond of
lawsuits seems a characteristic of an isolated people in new conditions.
The early settlers of New England were.

Notwithstanding the elevation of Boone, which insured a pure air, the
thermometer that afternoon stood at from 85 to 89 deg. The flies enjoyed
it. How they swarmed in this tavern! They would have carried off all
the food from the dining-room table (for flies do not mind eating
off oilcloth, and are not particular how food is cooked), but for the
machine with hanging flappers that swept the length of it; and they
destroy all possibility of sleep except in the dark. The mountain
regions of North Carolina are free from mosquitoes, but the fly has
settled there, and is the universal scourge. This tavern, one end of
which was a store, had a veranda