Our circuit consisted of seven counties, and the ridings were spring and fall, occupying about two months each term.  In each courthouse town was a tavern or two.  These houses of entertainment were not then dignified with the sonorous title of hotel.  The proprietors were usually jolly good fellows, or some staid matronly lady, in black gown and blue cap, and they all looked forward with anxious delight to the coming of court week.  Every preparation was made for the judge and lawyers.  Beds were aired and the bugs hunted out.  Saturday previous to the coming Monday was a busy day in setting all things to rights, and the scrubbing-broom was heard in consonance with calls to the servants to be busy and careful, as Sally and Nancy sprang to their work with a will.  With garments tucked up to their knees, they splashed the water and suds over the floors, strangers to the cleansing element until then for months ago.  A new supply of corn and fodder was arriving from the country; stables and stable lots were undergoing a scraping eminently required for the comfort of decent beasts, who gave their lives in labor to exacting man.  The room usually appropriated to the Bench and Bar was a great vagabond-hall, denominated the ball-room, and for this purpose appropriated once or twice a year.  Along the bare walls of this mighty dormitory were arranged beds, each usually occupied by a couple of the limbs of the law, and sometimes appropriated to three.  If there was not a spare apartment, a bed was provided here for the judge.  And if there were no lawyers from Augusta, this one was distinguished by the greatest mountain of feathers in the house.  Here assembled at night the rollicking boys of the Georgia Bar, who here indulged, without restraint, the convivialities for which they were so celebrated.  Humor and wit, in anecdotes and repartee, beguiled the hours; and the few old taverns time has spared, could they speak, might narrate more good things their walls have heard, than have ever found record in the Noctes Ambrosianae of the wits of Scrogie.

There are but few now left who have enjoyed a night in one of these old tumble-down rooms, with A.S.  Clayton, O.H.  Prince, A.B.  Longstreet, and John M. Dooly.  Here and there one, old, tottering, and gray, lives to laugh at his memories of those chosen spirits of fun.  Yes, that is the word—­fun—­for these ancients possessed a fund of mirth-exciting humor, combined with a biting wit, which, in the peregrinations of a long life, I have met nowhere else.  Were I to select one of these inns, it would be the old Walton Tavern, in the mean little hamlet of Livingston in Oglethorpe County, or the old house, kept long and indifferently, by that mountain of mortal obesity, Billy Springer, in Sparta, Hancock County.  It was here, and when Springer presided over the fried meat and eggs of this venerable home for the weary and hungry, after a night of it, that all were huddled to bed like pigs in a sty.