Eagerly as we were looking out for it, we passed the great Ramsey’s without knowing it, for it was the first of a little settlement of two houses and a saw-mill and barn.  It was a neat log house of two lower rooms and a summer kitchen, quite the best of the class that we saw, and the pleasant mistress of it made us welcome.  Across the road and close, to the Laurel was the spring-house, the invariable adjunct to every well-to-do house in the region, and on the stony margin of the stream was set up the big caldron for the family washing; and here, paddling in the shallow stream, while dinner was preparing, we established an intimacy with the children and exchanged philosophical observations on life with the old negress who was dabbling the clothes.  What impressed this woman was the inequality in life.  She jumped to the unwarranted conclusion that the Professor and the Friend were very rich, and spoke with asperity of the difficulty she experienced in getting shoes and tobacco.  It was useless to point out to her that her alfresco life was singularly blessed and free from care, and the happy lot of any one who could loiter all day by this laughing stream, undisturbed by debt or ambition.  Everybody about the place was barefooted, except the mistress, including the comely daughter of eighteen, who served our dinner in the kitchen.  The dinner was abundant, and though it seemed to us incongruous at the time, we were not twelve hours older when we looked back upon it with longing.  On the table were hot biscuit, ham, pork, and green beans, apple-sauce, blackberry preserves, cucumbers, coffee, plenty of milk, honey, and apple and blackberry pie.  Here we had our first experience, and I may say new sensation, of “honey on pie.”  It has a cloying sound as it is written, but the handmaiden recommended it with enthusiasm, and we evidently fell in her esteem, as persons from an uncultivated society, when we declared our inexperience of “honey on pie.”  “Where be you from?” It turned out to be very good, and we have tried to introduce it in families since our return, with indifferent success.  There did not seem to be in this family much curiosity about the world at large, nor much stir of social life.  The gayety of madame appeared to consist in an occasional visit to paw and maw and grandmaw, up the river a few miles, where she was raised.

Refreshed by the honey and fodder at Ramsey’s, the pilgrims went gayly along the musical Laurel, in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun, which played upon the rapids and illumined all the woody way.  Inspired by the misapprehension of the colored philosopher and the dainties of the dinner, the Professor soliloquized: 

  “So am I as the rich, whose blessed key
   Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,
   The which he will not every hour survey,
   For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure. 
   Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,
   Since seldom coming, in the long year set,
   Like stones of wealth they thinly placed are,
   Or captain jewels in the carcanet.”