Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/196

 wheel carriages, such as gigs and one horse chaises, valued at 5764 dollars, and twenty-one four wheel ones, coaches, chariots, &c. valued at 8900 dollars; since when four elegant ones have been added to the number. This may convey some idea of the taste for shew and expense which pervades this country. There are now here, fifteen hundred good and valuable horses, and seven hundred milk cows.

The police of Lexington seems to be well regulated: as one proof of which there is an established nightly watch.

The copper coinage of the United States is of no use in Kentucky—the smallest circulating coin being a silver sixteenth of a dollar.

There are four billiard tables in Lexington, and cards are a good deal played at taverns, where it is more customary to meet for that purpose than at private houses.

There is a coffee house here, where is a reading room for the benefit of subscribers and strangers, in which are forty-two files of different newspapers from various parts of the United States. It is supported {167} by subscribers, who pay six dollars each annually, and of which there are now sixty. In the same house is a billiard table, and chess and back-gammon tables, and the guests may be accommodated with wine, porter, beer, spirituous liquors, cordials and confectionary. It is kept by a Mr. Terasse, formerly of the island of St. Bartholomew. He had been unfortunate in mercantile business in the West Indies, and coming to this country, and failing in the recovery of some property he had shipped to New York, he had no other resource left to gain a provision for his family, but the teaching of the French language and dancing, in Lexington. The trustees of Transylvania college (or university, as the Lexington people proudly call it) employed him in the former, but had it not been for the latter, he might have starved. And here it may not be impertinent to remark, that in most parts of the United