Alas! the supper, served in a room dimly lighted with a smoky lamp, on a long table covered with oilcloth, was not of the sort to arouse the delayed and now gone appetite of a Reformer, and yet it did not lack variety: cornpone (Indian meal stirred up with water and heated through), hot biscuit, slack-baked and livid, fried salt-pork swimming in grease, apple-butter, pickled beets, onions and cucumbers raw, coffee (so-called), buttermilk, and sweet milk when specially asked for (the correct taste, however, is for buttermilk), and pie.
This was not the pie of commerce, but the pie of the country,--two thick slabs of dough, with a squeezing of apple between.The profusion of this supper staggered the novices, but the drovers attacked it as if such cooking were a common occurrence) and did justice to the weary labors of Mrs.Egger.
Egger is well prepared to entertain strangers, having several rooms and several beds in each room.Upon consultation with the drovers, they said they'd just as soon occupy an apartment by themselves, and we gave up their society for the night.The beds in our chamber had each one sheet, and the room otherwise gave evidence of the modern spirit; for in one corner stood the fashionable aesthetic decoration of our Queen Anne drawing-rooms,--the spinning-wheel.Soothed by this concession to taste, we crowded in between the straw and the home-made blanket and sheet, and soon ceased to hear the barking of dogs and the horned encounters of the drovers' herd.
We parted with Mr.Egger after breakfast (which was a close copy of the supper) with more respect than regret.His total charge for the entertainment of two men and two horses--supper, lodging, and breakfast--was high or low, as the traveler chose to estimate it.It was $1.20: that is, thirty cents for each individual, or ten cents for each meal and lodging.
Our road was a sort of by-way up Gentry Creek and over the Cut Laurel Gap to Worth's, at Creston Post Office, in North Carolina,--the next available halting place, said to be fifteen miles distant, and turning out to be twenty-two, and a rough road.There is a little settlement about Egger's, and the first half mile of our way we had the company of the schoolmistress, a modest, pleasant-spoken girl.
Neither she nor any other people we encountered had any dialect or local peculiarity of speech.Indeed, those we encountered that morning had nothing in manner or accent to distinguish them.The novelists had led us to expect something different; and the modest and pretty young lady with frank and open blue eyes, who wore gloves and used the common English speech, had never figured in the fiction of the region.Cherished illusions vanish often on near approach.
The day gave no peculiarity of speech to note, except the occasional use of "hit" for "it."The road over Cut Laurel Gap was very steep and stony, the thermometer mounted up to 80 deg., and, notwithstanding the beauty of the way, the ride became tedious before we reached the summit.On the summit is the dwelling and distillery of a colonel famous in these parts.We stopped at the house for a glass of milk; the colonel was absent, and while the woman in charge went after it, we sat on the veranda and conversed with a young lady, tall, gent, well favored, and communicative, who leaned in the doorway.
"Yes, this house stands on the line.Where you sit, you are in Tennessee; I'm in North Carolina.""Do you live here?"
"Law, no; I'm just staying a little while at the colonel's.I live over the mountain here, three miles from Taylorsville.I thought I'd be where I could step into North Carolina easy.""How's that?"
"Well, they wanted me to go before the grand jury and testify about some pistol-shooting down by our house, some friends of mine got into a little difficulty,--and I did n't want to.I never has no difficulty with nobody, never says nothing about nobody, has nothing against nobody, and I reckon nobody has nothing against me.""Did you come alone?"
"Why, of course.I come across the mountain by a path through the woods.That's nothing."A discreet, pleasant, pretty girl.This surely must be the Esmeralda who lives in these mountains, and adorns low life by her virgin purity and sentiment.As she talked on, she turned from time to time to the fireplace behind her, and discharged a dark fluid from her pretty lips, with accuracy of aim, and with a nonchalance that was not assumed, but belongs to our free-born American girls.I cannot tell why this habit of hers (which is no worse than the sister habit of "dipping") should take her out of the romantic setting that her face and figure had placed her in; but somehow we felt inclined to ride on farther for our heroine.
"And yet," said the Professor, as we left the site of the colonel's thriving distillery, and by a winding, picturesque road through a rough farming country descended into the valley,--"and yet, why fling aside so readily a character and situation so full of romance, on account of a habit of this mountain Helen, which one of our best poets has almost made poetical, in the case of the pioneer taking his westward way, with ox-goad pointing to the sky:
"'He's leaving on the pictured rock His fresh tobacco stain.'