When I arrived at this house, which was about dinner-time, I found the children parching corn in a spider. The father was absent, and it was necessary for me to remain until he returned. The mother made no movements toward getting dinner, and said nothing about it, which was a very unusual thing in my experience. At length the children brought to me some of the corn, which was parched brown, but not popped. I had by this time become satisfied that this was to be their only dinner, and ate some of it with them. The father returned in a few hours, and urged me to spend the night with them, which in the circumstances I was glad to do; I could easily have gone farther and fared worse. He soon took a bag and went through the woods a mile or two to a neighbor's, and returned with some corn-meal and a piece of bacon. The entirely empty larder being thus replenished, a meal was soon cooked, and I sat down to what was to me both a dinner and supper of corn-dodger and fried bacon. I called upon some of the families in this neighborhood, and some months after met one of the young ladies at the county-seat. In talking with her in regard to this visit, I said: "I was told that a number of the young women in your neighborhood can not read." "Oh!" said she, "there are but two there that can read." And yet I was told that there were two or three resident preachers there, but I had not time to call upon them. As the kind of food and lodging that I have described were so common to me, the chief "variety" that was the "spice" of my itinerant "life" was in the varied characters that I met. And I rarely found this "spice" of intenser flavor than in my own profession, among some of the preachers that I found in the Brush. The one that I had sought out, and with whose family I had spent the night, was one of the most remarkable of his type with whom I became acquainted.