cabin. Blankets, and bear and
buffalo-skins, constituted often the principal bed-covering.

One of the chief resources for food was the chase. All kinds of game
were then very abundant; and when the hunter chanced, to have a goodly
supply of ammunition, his fortune was made for the year. The game was
plainly dressed, and served up on wooden platters, with corn-bread, and
the Indian dish-the well known _hominy_. The corn was ground with great
difficulty, on the laborious hand-mills; for mills of other descriptions
were then, and for many years afterwards, unknown in Kentucky.

Such was the simple manner of life led by our "pilgrim fathers." They
had fewer luxuries, but perhaps were, withal, more happy than their more
fastidious descendants. Hospitality was not then an empty name; every
log-cabin was freely thrown open to all who chose to share in the best
cheer its inmates could afford. The early settlers of Kentucky were
bound together by the strong ties of common hardships and dangers--to
say nothing of other bonds of union--and they clung together with great
tenacity. On the slightest alarm of Indian invasion, they all made
common cause, and flew together to the rescue. There was less
selfishness, and more generous chivalry; less bickering, and more
cordial charity, then, than at present; notwithstanding all our boasted
refinement.

[Footnote 11: Born in Kentucky, and long eminent as a controversial
writer and a Prelate of the Roman Catholic church. His "sketches" give
much interesting information respecting the early history of that church
at the West.]

[Footnote 12: Marshall--History of Kentucky.]

* * * * *

=_James Henry Thornwell,[13] 1811-1862._=

From the "Discourses on Truth."

=_36._= EVIL TENDENCIES OF AN ACT OF SIN.

There is a double tendency in every voluntary determination, one to
propagate itself, the other to weaken or support, according to its own
moral quality, the general principle of virtue. Every sin, therefore,
imparts a proclivity to other acts of the same sort, and disturbs and
deranges, at the same time, the whole moral constitution, it tends to
the formation of special habits, and to the superinducing of a general
debility of principle, which lays a man open to defeat from every
species of temptation. The extent to which a single act shall produce
this double effect, depends upon its intensity, its intensity depends
upon the fullness and energy of