Before leaving the grounds, it was arranged between us that we should all meet at a designated place in the morning, and I would travel with them to the conference, to which I was thus far on my way. Though not an Arminian, but a Calvinist, though not a Methodist, but a Presbyterian, I knew that a cordial welcome awaited me as a representative of the American Bible Society. I knew that, in addition to this official welcome, I should receive the warm greetings of brethren beloved, with whom I had traveled many hundreds of miles over their "circuits," and mingled in all the novel, interesting, and eventful scenes in their wild itinerant life. When I met the elder the next morning, I asked him the nature of the very ample accommodations that were offered him. He said he slept upon the floor, but he did not undertake to count the number who shared it with him. So ended the various incidents of our basket-meeting; but the recollection of it has been among the pleasant memories of my life in the Brush. SOME EXPLANATORY WORDS. Perhaps some statement in explanation of this "rough" but abounding hospitality of the people in the Brush is demanded in justice to those persons and places whose hospitality would seem to suffer in the contrast. I might enumerate many circumstances connected with life in a wild, unsettled country that will occur to most readers as the cause of this abounding hospitality; but it seems to me that the _chief_ reason is the fact that meat, bread, and all their provisions, excepting groceries, cost them so very little. They estimate what they can use scarcely more than the water taken from their springs. Beef, pork, and bread cost them almost nothing. Their cattle run at large, and their free range includes thousands of acres of unoccupied lands. They grow and increase in this manner with but little attention or care. The hogs find their food in the woods the greater part of the year, and in the fall they fatten upon the nuts or "mast." The oak, hickory, beech, and other trees that abound in these extensive forests afford vast quantities of these nuts, which these people claim for their own hogs, whoever may own the land. I knew a man that owned several thousand acres of these lands, who sold the nuts on the ground to a "speculator," who drove his hogs upon the tract of land to eat them. But the residents were incensed at this trespass upon their immemorial privileges, and secretly shot and killed so many of these hogs that their owner was glad to escape with any part of his drove, and leave them possessors of the "mast." The method by which these people retain and recognize their ownership in the hogs that run at large and mingle together in the woods was quite new to me. The owner looks carefully after the young pigs, calls them, and feeds them, for some days or weeks, until they know his voice, and will come at his call. Whatever kind of a hoot, scream, or yell it is, they learn to