As the accommodations at the Spring were already occupied, we rode up to an old fashioned log house, with a long piazza in front, surrounded by lombardy poplars and apple trees, and screened from the road by an intervening hill, and obtained accommodations with its kind and pleasant occupants. No part of my time among the mountains, was attended with more peculiar or deeper interest than that passed in the Muddy Creek settlement. Every thing about this region is calculated to bring one back to the early days of our country. The habits and customs are all after the unpretending fashion of the pioneers; and human character is here seen in its native simplicity. Refinement, with its luxuries and follies, has not yet penetrated this secluded region, to corrupt the plain and simple customs of its generous, open-hearted and upright yeomanry. Here too, as a friend remarked, we realize, to some extent, the amazing and almost startling rapidity with which our nation has sprung into existence. But a few years ago this was the undisputed home of the Indian. This identical house was once the last house on the frontier of civilized America; and one of the family now alive, was among the little band who first ventured across the Alleghany mountains, and carried the sounds of civilized life into these desolate wilds. Hers was the last family on the western frontier. Not a civilized being stood on the wide waste of wilderness which stretched far away to the shores of the Pacific. But, with unexampled rapidity, civilization has transformed the whole face of the country; and this old lady, who thought she "had gotten to the end of the world when she got to Greenbrier," has, within her own recollection, seen a nation springing up west of her, already putting on the vigor and energy of mature years, and outstripping the nations of the eastern world.