Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/211

 Passed another Washington,[69] a young county seat (or town) and several fine neighbourhoods of rich land, full of iron-weed, but not so rank as in Kentucky, yet bearing plenty of huge sugar-trees. Every state in this mighty Union seems emulous of {211} building towns, monumental piles of immortality to General Washington.

Rested for the night at a good bricked house tavern on the White-river ferry, but without one glass window in it. It is getting old and wearing out before it is finished. Here I found a good supper of buck venison, fowls, whiskey, and coffee. My hostess, the owner, was lately a rich widow, and might have remained so, but for a Yankee soldier with a knapsack at his back, whose lot it was to call at her house. They are now married, and he is lord of the tavern, land and all. My host had a large party of distant neighbours assembled to effect a corn shucking, something like an English hawkey, or harvest home. All, gentle and simple, here work hard till eleven at night. Corn shucking means plucking the ears of Indian corn from the stalk, and then housing it in cribs, purposely made to keep it in, for winter use. The stalk is left in the field; the leaves, while half green, are stripped off, and tied up in bundles, as hay for horses and cattle, and good food it is, much resembling in form the flags in English marshes. After I had retired to bed the hawkey supper commenced; all seemed fun, created by omnipotent whiskey, with which they plentifully supplied me, although in bed. "The Doctor, the Squire, the Colonel," said they, "shall drink and lack no good thing." I was consequently pressed to rise and join them, about one