Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/237

 and thirty cows and oxen, which one Johnston was driving from the neighbourhood of Lexington in Kentucky, to Baltimore. The intercourse between the most distant parts of the United States is now so common, that imported merchandize is wagonned all the way to Chilicothe and the intermediate towns, from Philadelphia and Baltimore, nearly six hundred miles, and then retailed as cheaply as at the ports of entry.

The drover with six assistants, two horsemen, two family wagons, and the stage wagon, put up at Beymer's for the night, so that the house which was only a double cabin, was well filled, though not so much crowded as might have been expected, as the cattle drivers made a fire and encamped without doors, convenient to where they had penned the cattle, and {207} one of the travelling families slept in their wagon.—This family consisted of a man and his wife, and a neighbour's daughter, who had removed to this state last year, from near Washington in Pennsylvania, and were now returning two hundred miles for some effects they had left behind. The other family, named Hutchinson, had emigrated from Massachusetts to Franklinville in this state, four years ago. By clearing and cultivating a farm and keeping a store, a distillery, and a saw mill, and then selling their property at its increased value, they had in that short time acquired a sufficiency to think themselves independent, and were now returning, to settle in some place in the neighbourhood of Albany, in the state of New York, where the old man said, "he would be once more in the world." The systematick order which this family observed in travelling, and the comparative ease and comfort they enjoyed in consequence, were circumstances noticed by me with much admiration. The family consisted of Hutchinson and his wife, two daughters from fifteen to seventeen years of age, a grown up son they called doctor, another son about ten,