Smyth purchased two horses at Petersburg. For the best he gave £15 and the worst cost him £25. On the 4th of September he left Blandford and rode fifteen miles to Hatton’s Ordinary, and thence to the Nottoway River, at Swede’s Bridge. “I arrived at Stewart’s Ordinary to breakfast, which was toasted Indian hoecake and very excellent cyder. Being always particularly careful of my horses, and they having fared very indifferently the night before, I ordered the hostler to give them plenty of meat.” The hostler understanding meat to mean meat, put bacon before these Petersburg horses. A crowd assembled, and this new balanced ration became a great joke. The horses having been fed corn, which, after all, is a form of bacon, the party proceeded to Three Creeks, crossed them on three wooden bridges, and then crossed the Meherrin at Hicks’s Bridge, “remarkably lofty and built of timber, as all in the southern part of America appear to be.” Near Hicks’s Bridge[A] (and ford) lived Mr. Willis, breeder of the original stock of triumphant quarter racers. “We took some refreshment at Edwards’s Ordinary, an exceedingly good building, with excellent accommodations, lately erected at this place. At the distance of ten miles we entered the province of North Carolina.” Smyth mentions that the James River lowgrounds produced twenty-five, thirty, and sometimes thirty-five bushels of wheat from one of seed; the high land from eight to fifteen for one. “Much about the same quantity of Indian corn is produced from an acre, according to the quality and excellence of the soil, though it does not require more than a peck of seed to plant it. The produce of an acre in the culture of tobacco, in the best land, is about 1,660 pounds weight; on the worst about 500 pounds weight. An acre always contains nearly 1,250 hills of Indian corn, with two, three, and sometimes in strong land, four stalks in each hill, or about 5,000 plants of tobacco.” In the summer-time, says Captain Smyth, the average planter “rises in the morning about 6 o’clock [the very rich men, he says, rose at 9]; he then drinks a julep, made of rum, water and sugar, but very strong; then he walks, or more generally rides, round his plantation, views all his stock and all his crop, breakfasts about 10 o’clock on cold turkey, cold meat, fried hominy, toast and cyder, ham, bread and butter, tea, coffee or chocolate, which last, however, is seldom tasted but by the women; the rest of the day he spends in much the same manner before described [i. e., in trying to keep cool]; he eats no supper; they never even think of it. The women very seldom drink tea in the afternoon, the men never.”