Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 11).djvu/62

 "I had before tasted the sweets of mudholes, huge stones, and remnants of pine-trees standing and cut down; but here was something new, namely, a bed of reddish-coloured clay, from one to two feet deep, so adhesive that the wheels were at times literally not visible in any one spot from the box to the tire, and the poor horses' feet sounded, when they drew them out (as a fellow-traveller observed), like the report of a pistol. I am sorry that I was not sufficiently acquainted with chemistry or mineralogy to analyze that wonderful clay and state its constituent parts; but if I were now called upon to give a receipt for a mess most nearly resembling it, I would write, 'Recipe—(nay, I must write the ingredients in English, for fear of taxing my Latin learning too severely)—