If he was to go to the left, it read,.M 01 ENOOB oTA 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 in front, and a back gallery, where there were evidences of female refinement in pots of plants and flowers.The landlord himself kept tavern very much as a hostler would, but we had to make a note in his favor that he had never heard of a milk punch.And it might as well be said here, for it will have to be insisted on later, that the traveler, who has read about the illicit stills till his imagination dwells upon the indulgence of his vitiated tastes in the mountains of North Carolina, is doomed to disappointment.If he wants to make himself an exception to the sober people whose cooking will make him long for the maddening bowl, he must bring his poison with him.We had found no bread since we left Virginia; we had seen cornmeal and water, slack-baked; we had seen potatoes fried in grease, and bacon incrusted with salt (all thirst-provokers), but nothing to drink stronger than buttermilk.And we can say that, so far as our example is concerned, we left the country as temperate as we found it.How can there be mint juleps (to go into details) without ice? and in the summer there is probably not a pound of ice in all the State north of Buncombe County.
There is nothing special to be said about Boone.We were anxious to reach it, we were glad to leave it; we note as to all these places that our joy at departing always exceeds that on arriving, which is a merciful provision of nature for people who must keep moving.This country is settled by genuine Americans, who have the aboriginal primitive traits of the universal Yankee nation.The front porch in the morning resembled a carpenter's shop; it was literally covered with the whittlings of the row of natives who had spent the evening there in the sedative occupation of whittling.
We took that morning a forest road to Valle Crusis, seven miles, through noble growths of oaks, chestnuts, hemlocks, rhododendrons,--a charming wood road, leading to a place that, as usual, did not keep the promise of its name.Valle Crusis has a blacksmith shop and a dirty, flyblown store.While the Professor consulted the blacksmith about a loose shoe, the Friend carried his weariness of life without provisions up to a white house on the hill, and negotiated for boiled milk.This house was occupied by flies.They must have numbered millions, settled in black swarms, covering tables, beds, walls, the veranda; the kitchen was simply a hive of them.The only book in sight, Whewell's--Elements of Morality," seemed to attract flies.
Query, Why should this have such a different effect from Porter's? Awhite house,--a pleasant-looking house at a distance,--amiable, kindly people in it,--why should we have arrived there on its dirty day? Alas! if we had been starving, Valle Crusis had nothing to offer us.