One by one the small congregation arrived at the chapel--men, women, and children--on horseback. When they had all assembled, we went in, and I preached, and they "lifted a collection" amounting to three dollars and twenty-five cents. After dining with Brother M----, at a house near by, I mounted my horse for a long ride, to reach my appointment for the night. My kind friends gave me a great many directions, and I started out. There was nothing worthy of the name of a public road. There were wagon-tracks and paths running in all directions among the black-jacks, and crossing each other at all angles. Whenever, for a short distance, there was a fence on both sides of a road, _that_ was called a "lane." One track would lead me to the back side of a tobacco-patch, where it ended; another led me where some rails had been "mauled" and recently hauled away. The roads leading to plantations were more worn, and looked more like the "main traveled road," than those that were intended for public highways. I inquired my way at each plantation that I passed, and every other opportunity; and these were far too rare for my wants. Once I saw, from an elevation, a peach-tree in bloom in the distance. It was like the human footprint in the sand to Robinson Crusoe on his lonely island. I said, "There is a sign of humanity," and started for it. But when I reached it the log-cabin near which it was planted was empty, and I started out again into the labyrinths of paths. Often that afternoon, and oftener in the years that followed, when I have been lost in the Brush, I exclaimed, "Blessed be the man that devised our national system of 'sectional surveys'!" I do not know what man or men devised it, but I do know that the country owes him or them a debt of gratitude it can never pay. Where section-lines are established, there roads are located, roads running at right angles, and school-districts, townships, and larger communities have definite boundaries; and every neighborhood and farm may have the benefit of established and good roads. These barrens, like vast regions of country over which I have traveled, never had the benefit of such a survey. The original settlers had found places where the land, timber, water, etc., suited them, and had measured off, perhaps with a pole or grape-vine, hundreds or thousands of acres in any shape their fancy directed--their surveys often overlapping each other at various points. Hence interminable lawsuits in regard to boundaries, and the greater calamity of having no established lines for a uniform system of roads. A learned author has said, "You may judge the civilization of a country by its roads." If this is a true criterion, there is a vast extent of country over which I have traveled, in the Southwest and South, that will take a very low rank in the scale of civilization. I remember one man in the Brush who told me he had raised that year three hogsheads of tobacco, but the roads