retful "good-bye" to
our hospitable entertainers, and once more took to the road.

The storm had cleared away, but the ground was heavy with the recent
rain, and our horses were sadly jaded with the ride of the morning. We
gave them the reins, and, jogging on at their leisure, it was ten
o'clock at night before they landed us at the little hamlet of W----
Station, in the state of North Carolina.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE RAILWAY STATION.

A large hotel, or station-house, and about a dozen log shanties made up
the village. Two of these structures were negro-cabins; two were small
groceries, in which the vilest alcoholic compounds were sold at a bit
(ten cents) a glass; one was a lawyer's office, in which was the
post-office, and a justice's court, where, once a month, the small
offenders of the vicinity "settled up their accounts;" one was a
tailoring and clothing establishment, where breeches were patched at a
dime a stitch, and payment taken in tar and turpentine; and the rest
were private dwellings of one apartment, occupied by the grocers, the
tailor, the switch-tenders, the postmaster, and the negro _attaches_ of
the railroad. The church and the school-house--the first buildings to go
up in a Northern village--I have omitted to enumerate, because--they
were not there.

One of the natives told me that the lawyer was a "stuck-up critter;" "he
don't live; he don't--he puts-up at th' hotel." And the hotel! Would
Shakspeare, had he have known it, have written of taking one's _ease_ at
his inn? It was a long, framed building, two stories high, with a
piazza extending across the side and a front door crowded as closely
into one corner as the width of the joist would permit. Under the
piazza, ranged along the wall, was a low bench, occupied by about forty
tin wash-basins and water-pails, and with coarse, dirty crash towels
suspended on rollers above it. By the side of each of these towels hung
a comb and a brush, to which a lock of everybody's hair was clinging,
forming in the total a stock sufficient to establish any barber in the
wig business.

It was, as I have said, ten o'clock when we reached the Station.
Throwing the bridles of our horses over the hitching-posts at the door,
we at once made our way to the bar-room. That apartment, which was in
the rear of the building, and communicated with by a long, narrow
passage, was filled almost to suffocation, when we entered, by a cloud
of tobacco smoke, the fumes of