Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/142

 The elder of the two was Neisanger.—Though he did not say us "nay" to our request of supper, his "yea" was in the very extreme of bluntness, and without either the manner or expression which sometimes merits its having joined to it the adjective honest.

{115} They laid aside their rifles, and supper being announced by the mistress of the cabin, we made a hearty meal on her brown bread and milk, while she attended her self-important lord with all due humility, as Sarah did Abraham; which patriarchal record in the scriptures, is perhaps the original cause of a custom which I have observed to be very common in the remote parts of the United States, of the wife not sitting down to table until the husband and the strangers have finished their meal.

During supper, Mr. Neisanger gradually relaxed from his blunt and cautious brevity of speech, and we gathered from him that he had been a great hunter and woodsman, in which occupation, he said that one man may in one season kill two hundred deer and eighty bears.

He had changed his pursuit of the wild inhabitants of the forest about nine years ago, for an agricultural life. Since that time he had cleared a large tract of land, had planted three thousand fruit trees on his farm, and had carried on a distillery of whiskey and peach brandy, for the first of which he gets seventy-five cents per gallon, and for the last a dollar.

After supper we took leave of this Nimrod of the west without much regret, as our seats while under his roof had not been the most easy to us, and we returned to our boat with more pleasure than we had done heretofore.

We betook ourselves to rest on our platform, lulled to repose by the mournful hooting of the owl, whose ill omened note was amply compensated for by the delightful melody