A cart laden with country produce enters the settlement from the farms behind it. Every housewife drops her broom, and rushes out to waylay the huckster, and induce him to sell her the provisions already engaged to her neighbor. Happy she, if stout enough of arm to convey her booty home with her; for if she trust the vendor to leave it at her house, even after paying him his price, she may bid good-bye to the green delights, as eagerly craved here as on a long sea-voyage. This "peculiar institution" is all very well, doubtless, for those who understand it, but is somewhat inconvenient to a stranger, as Miselle discovered during the three days she was trying to leave Tarr Farm. On the third morning, after waiting two hours upon the bank of the Creek for a perjured boatman, Mr. Williams rushed desperately into a crowd of teamsters and captured the youth whose first impressions of a railway have been chronicled on a preceding page. Probably even he, had time been allowed to consider the proposition at length, would have declined the journey; but, overborne by the vehemence of his employer, he found himself well upon the road to Schaeffer's Farm before he had by any means decided to go thither. The pleasantest part of the "carriage exercise" on this road is fording the Creek, a course adopted wherever the bluff comes down to the bank, and the flat reappears upon the opposite side, no one having yet spent time to grade a continuous road on one side or the other. A railway company has, however, made a beginning in this direction; and it is promised that in another year the traveller may proceed from Schaeffer's to Oil City by rail. At Titusville Miselle bade good-bye to her kind friend Williams, and once more took herself under her own protection. Spending the night at Corry, she next day found herself in the city of Erie, and could have fancied it Heidelberg instead, the signs bearing such names as Schultz, Seelinger, Jantzen, Cronenberger, Heidt, and Heybeck. Hans Preuss sells bread, Valentin Ulrich manufactures saddles, and P. Loesch keeps a meat-market, with a sign representing one gentleman holding a mad bull by a bit of packthread tied to his horns, while an assistant leisurely strolls up to annihilate the creature with a tack-hammer. Here, too, a little beyond the middle of the town, was a girl herding a flock of geese, precisely as did the princess in the "Brueder Grimm Tales," while a doltish boy stared at her with just the imbecile admiration of Kurdkin for the wily maiden who combed her golden, hair and chanted her naughty spell in the same breath. A little farther on stood a charming old Dutch cottage with cabbages in the front yard, and a hop-vine clambering the porch. An infant Teuton swung upon the gate, who, being addressed by Miselle, lisped an answer in High Dutch, while his mother shrilly exchanged the news with her next neighbor in the same tongue.