f course this was a circumstance of no small annoyance; but as
our company was again increased some time after, and subsequently I had
to travel in a railroad carriage that held upwards of twenty people, I
had to resign myself to this, among the other miseries of this most
miserable journey.

As we alighted from our coach, we encountered the comical spectacle of
the two coach-loads of gentlemen who had traveled the same route as
ourselves, with wrist-bands and coat-cuffs turned back, performing their
morning ablutions all together at a long wooden dresser in the open air,
though the morning was piercing cold. Their toilet accommodations were
quite of the most primitive order imaginable, as indeed were ours. We
(the women) were all shown into one small room, the whole furniture of
which consisted of a chair and wooden bench: upon the latter stood one
basin, one ewer, and a relic of soap, apparently of great antiquity.
Before, however, we could avail ourselves of these ample means of
cleanliness, we were summoned down to breakfast; but as we had traveled
all night, and all the previous day, and were to travel all the ensuing
day and night, I preferred washing to eating, and determined, if I could
not do both, at least to accomplish the first. There was neither towel,
nor glass for one's teeth, nor hostess or chambermaid to appeal to. I
ran through all the rooms on the floor, of which the doors were open;
but though in one I found a magnificent veneered chest of drawers, and
large looking-glass, neither of the above articles were discoverable.
Again the savage passion for ornament occurred to me as I looked at this
piece of furniture, which might have adorned the most luxurious bedroom
of the wealthiest citizen in New York--here in this wilderness, in a
house which seemed but just cut out of the trees, where a tin pan was
brought to me for a basin, and where the only kitchen, of which the
window of our room, to our sorrow, commanded an uninterrupted prospect,
was an open shed, not fit to stable a well-kept horse in. As I found
nothing that I could take possession of in the shape of towel or
tumbler, I was obliged to wait on the stairs, and catch one of the dirty
black girls who were running to and fro serving the breakfast-room. Upon
asking one of these nymphs for a towel, she held up to me a horrible
cloth, which, but for the evidence to the contrary which its filthy
surface presented, I should have supposed had been used