Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/218

 on Brush creek, I was informed, that there is a fine settlement, but it is not in sight of the road. The next two miles was through a beech bottom, which was rendered so miry by the rain that poured on me all the time, that it was most laborious walking through it. About the middle of it, I met three men in hunting shirts with each an axe in his hand. Their appearance in that solitary situation was no ways agreeable; however, we gave each other good day, and they told me that old Lashley had desired them to inform me that he would await me at Bradley's, the next house, but when I came there, he had just departed, so that I might have very soon overtaken him, had I not preferred being alone, to effect which the more certainly, I stopped to rest, as it was a house of private entertainment. Bradley and his wife are about sixteen years from Stewartstown, county Tyrone in Ireland, and have a daughter lately married to a young shoemaker named Irons at the next cabin, where I stopped to get my shoes mended. I here found a dozen of stout young fellows who had been at work repairing the road, and were now sheltering themselves from the increasing storm, and listening to some indifferent musick made by their host on a tolerably good violin. I proposed taking the violin while he repaired my shoes. He consented and sat down to work, and in a few minutes I had all the lads jigging it on the floor merrily; Irons himself, as soon as he had repaired the shoes, jumping up and joining them.

{189} Seeing no prospect of the storm ceasing, I satisfied my shoemaker for his trouble, with something more agreeable to him than my musick, and then set off to reach Talbot's, said to be a good tavern, three miles further.

The road led over the highest hill which I had yet seen since I left the Ohio, and afterwards through a level, well wooded, but thinly inhabited country.