Their supper consisted of good coffee, with cream and maple sugar; good bread, with fresh butter and cheese; venison steak and broiled chickens; and lastly, of a dish of baked pears, cold, and a pitcher of milk. Frank was surprised to find such excellence of fare amid the ragged poverty of the mountain cabin; but, on afterwards expressing this surprise to Captain Clifton, he was told by the latter, that such contrasts were by no means rare. Mr. Fairfax applied himself with zeal to the good things before him, until the sharpness of his appetite was sated, and then lingered long over the meal, conversing with his host upon the state of the country in his region, the climate and soil, productions, market, etc., and receiving from the young mountaineer the information that there was no great amount of produce about there, except in the glens, grazing for the cattle, and that the roads were so bad, and the towns and villages so distant, that nothing was raised for market, except such kind of produce as could walk thither, to wit: flocks and herds. That his grandfather, before the infirmities of age had come upon him, had raised herds of kine and hogs, which he drove fifty miles to market every year; but that was some years ago, when he himself was a child. That now they only had a few sheep, which his sister tended while he was at work on a plantation at the foot of the mountain. In reply to a question Frank put while leisurely using his gold tooth-pick, the young man informed him farther that himself and his sister were of German and Irish descent. That the old man, their grandfather, was a German by birth, but had lived nearly seventy years in America. That his name was Carl Wetzel, and his only daughter, Caterina, had been married to an Irish emigrant, of the name of Kavanagh. That _they_ were the parents of himself and sister. Finally, that they had been dead nearly seven years. It was farther ascertained that old Carl Wetzel had been a man of considerable education; and it was easily seen that Carl Kavanagh had inherited much of his father’s Irish quickness of intelligence, and much of his grandfather’s German love of knowledge.