didn't like it. Apropos of girls, I may say that there is a _far_ higher
standard of morals among these people than among the ignorant elsewhere.

It was indeed a wild country. One day Goshorn showed me a hill, and a
hunter had told him that when standing on it one summer afternoon he had
seen in a marshy place the very unusual spectacle of forty bears, all
wallowing together in the mud and playing at once. Also the marks of a
bear's claws on a tree. Game was plenty in this region. All the time
that I stayed with Goshorn we had every day at his well-furnished table
bear's meat, venison, or other game, fish, ham, chickens, &c.

There was a great deal of very beautiful scenery on Elk River, and some
of its "incidents" were marvellously strange. The hard sandstone rocks
had worn into shapes resembling castles and houses, incredibly like
buildings made by man. One day I saw and copied a vast square rock
through which ran to the light a perfect Gothic archway sixty feet high,
with a long wall like the side of a castle, and an immense square tower.
There are the most natural-looking houses and Schlosser imaginable rising
all alone in the forest. Very often the summits of the hills were
crowned with round towers. On the Ohio River there is a group of these
shaped like segments of a truncated cone, and "corniced" with another
piece reversed, like this:

{Round tower: p304.jpg}

These are called "Devil's Tea-tables." I drew them several times, but
could never give them the appearance of being _natural_ objects. It is
very extraordinary how Nature seems to have mocked man in advance in
these structures. In Fingal's Cave there is an absolutely original style
of architecture.

The last house which we came to was the best. In it dwelt a gentlemanly
elderly man with two ladylike daughters. His son, who was dressed in
"store clothes," had been a delegate to the Wheeling Convention. But the
war had borne hard on them, and for a long time _everything_ which they
used or wore had been made by their own hands. They had a home-made loom
and spinning-wheel--I saw several such looms on the river; they raised
their own cotton and wool and maple sugar, and were in all important
details utterly self-sustaining and independent. And they did not live
rudely at all, but like ladies and gentlemen, as really intelligent
people always can when they are _free_. The father had, not long before,
standing in his own door, shot a dee