Toward evening I wandered into a small pasture, doing my best to think how I could best pay off the black termagant with safety to myself, when with great good luck I suddenly beheld a huge hornet's nest, hanging in a bunch of shrubbery. My plan instantly and fully developed. Quickly I returned to the house and hastily gathered what little clothing I owned into a bundle, done up in my one handkerchief, an imitation of bandanna, of very loud pattern. This bundle I secreted in the barn and then hied me to the hornet's nest. Approaching the swinging home of the hornets very softly, so as not to disturb the inmates, I stuffed the entrance to the hornet castle with sassafras leaves, and taking the great sphere in my arms I bore it to a back window of the kitchen where the black beldame was vigorously at work within and contentedly droning a negro hymn. Dark was coming on and a drizzly rain was falling. It was the spring of the year, the day had been warm and the kitchen window was open. I stole up to the open window. The woman's back was toward me. I removed the plug of sassafras leaves and hurled the hornet's nest so that it landed under the hag's skirts. I watched the proceedings for one short moment, and then, as it was getting late, I concluded I had better be off for St. Louis. So I went away from there at the best gait I could command. I could hear my arch-enemy screaming, and it was music to my ears that even thrills me yet, sometimes. It was a better supper than she would have given me. I saw the negroes running from the quarters, and elsewhere, toward the kitchen, and I must beg the reader to endeavor to imagine the scene in that culinary department, as I am unable to describe it, not having waited to see it out. But I slid for the barn, secured my bundle and started for the ancient city far away. All night, on foot and alone, I trudged the turnpike that ran through Nashville. I arrived in that city about daylight, tired and hungry, but was too timid to stop for something to eat, notwithstanding I had my four dollars safe in my pocket, and had not eaten since noon, the day before. I plodded along through the town and crossed the Cumberland river on a ferry-boat, and then pulled out in a northerly direction for about an hour, when I came to a farm-house. In the road in front of the house I met the proprietor who was going from his garden, opposite the house, to his breakfast. He waited until I came up, and as I was about to pass on, he said: "Hello! my boy, where are you going so early this morning?" I told him I was on my way to St. Louis. "St. Louis?" he said. "I never heard of that place before. Where is it?" I told him I thought it was in Missouri, but was not certain. "Are you going all the way on foot, and alone?" I answered that I was, and that I had no other way to go. With that I started on. "Hold on," he said. "If you are going to walk that long way you had better come in and have some breakfast."