Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/168

 very narrow, being confined by a picturesque range of low rocky cliffs and mountains, with a few straggling pines overtopping the other trees on their summits.

Three miles further we stopped at Portsmouth on the right, and breakfasted at John Brown's tavern. Mr. Brown is a magistrate and keeps a store. After breakfast, the wind blowing too fresh up the river for us to make any progress without great labour, I walked to the upper end of the town, through a straight street, parallel to the Ohio, about half a mile long, on the top of a handsome sloping bank. I returned by a back street, which brought me to the banks of the Scioto, which river, running from the northward, falls into the Ohio a mile below Portsmouth, at an angle of thirty-three degrees, leaving only sufficient room between the two rivers for two parallel streets, on the one of which fronting the Ohio, building lots of a quarter of an acre, now sell at fifty dollars each. There is a {141} narrow level near a mile long below the town to the point of junction of the Scioto with the Ohio, which cannot be built on, as it is annually inundated by the spring floods: there is now a fine field of corn on it, and it would all make excellent meadow. Mr. Massie, of Chilicothe, who is proprietor of both it and the town, asks fifteen hundred dollars for it, though it does not appear to contain fifty acres.[107]