[Illustration: Maysville, on the Ohio, Kentucky] We took leave of our host and hostess not without some regret, and, as we slowly paced up the long hill which rises immediately from the town, looked back frequently to view the beautiful river scenery from the different points it offered: a turn at the top suddenly presented on all sides a cleared, well cultivated, and inclosed country; the road was good, the day beautiful, and we bowled along through plentiful crops of Indian corn, rejoicing that we had escaped the wilderness, and thinking we had really entered upon the garden of the United States. After a few miles of good road however these pleasant ideas were shaken out by an absolute rock, upon which with but little intermission we rattled for near twenty miles, passing through a place called Blue Licks.[29] At its salt springs {70} the deer and buffaloe used formerly to be found in immense herds; it is now a watering place, the resort of invalids: yet let not the English reader here picture to himself either Bath, Cheltenham, or Tunbridge Wells, but a few dispersed log huts and two taverns of the same description. Many of the men here wear, instead of a coat, a short cloak, a little resembling that part of the old English dress, which if they knew how to carry with any grace would look well. The drought is now exceedingly great, and we have reports of much stock dying to the south of this state for want of water; we therefore see the country at as unfavourable a time as possible; yet, under these disadvantages, the grass is really green, a circumstance which proves the strong natural fertility of the soil, also shewn by the spontaneous growth of the white clover among the trees of the uncleared forest land where it has been grazed. Of this grazed forest the farmers assert that it will not, when cleared, broke up and sown, produce so much corn by one third per acre as that which has not been grazed, and many of them consequently shut up their forest land from all cattle and even from pigs. {71} AN ODD MISTAKE A little black boy was playing upon the ground, at the tavern-door with a dog; I pointed to them and said to the landlord, (a very civilized man,) "Do you make christians of these?" "Oh no."--"You name them without the clergyman?" "Oh yes; we sometimes give them one name and then alter it for another:"--"And does not your church find fault with you sometimes for such neglect?" "No, they never think of such things." "And when they die you throw them into the ground without further ceremony?" _Answer_,--Always let them lie just where it happens--I suppose, you do not do so in your country; do you? _Self_,--Certainly not; we think very differently upon the subject; that child would there be free, the moment it set foot upon our shores.