It was a hot afternoon, and it needed some courage to mount and climb the sandy hill leading us away from the corn-crib of Tatem.  But we entered almost immediately into fine stretches of forest, and rode under the shade of great oaks.  The way, which began by the New River, soon led us over the hills to the higher levels of Watauga County.  So far on our journey we had been hemmed in by low hills, and without any distant or mountain outlooks.  The excessive heat seemed out of place at the elevation of over two thousand feet, on which we were traveling.  Boone, the county seat of Watauga County, was our destination, and, ever since morning, the guideboards and the trend of the roads had notified us that everything in this region tends towards Boone as a center of interest.  The simple ingenuity of some of the guide-boards impressed us.  If, on coming to a fork, the traveler was to turn to the right, the sign read,

   To Boone 10 M.
If he was to go to the left, it read,
   .M 01 ENOOB oT

A short ride of nine miles, on an ascending road, through an open, unfenced forest region, brought us long before sundown to this capital.  When we had ridden into its single street, which wanders over gentle hills, and landed at the most promising of the taverns, the Friend informed his comrade that Boone was 3250 feet above Albemarle Sound, and believed by its inhabitants to be the highest village east of the Rocky Mountains.  The Professor said that it might be so, but it was a God-forsaken place.  Its inhabitants numbered perhaps two hundred and fifty, a few of them colored.  It had a gaunt, shaky court-house and jail, a store or two, and two taverns.  The two taverns are needed to accommodate the judges and lawyers and their clients during the session of the court.  The court is the only excitement and the only amusement.  It is the event from which other events date.  Everybody in the county knows exactly when court sits, and when court breaks.  During the session the whole county is practically in Boone, men, women, and children.  They camp there, they attend the trials, they take sides; half of them, perhaps, are witnesses, for the region is litigious, and the neighborhood quarrels are entered into with spirit.  To be fond of lawsuits seems a characteristic of an isolated people in new conditions.  The early settlers of New England were.

Notwithstanding the elevation of Boone, which insured a pure air, the thermometer that afternoon stood at from 85 to 89 deg.  The flies enjoyed it.  How they swarmed in this tavern!  They would have carried off all the food from the dining-room table (for flies do not mind eating off oilcloth, and are not particular how food is cooked), but for the machine with hanging flappers that swept the length of it; and they destroy all possibility of sleep except in the dark.  The mountain regions of North Carolina are free from mosquitoes, but the fly has settled there, and is the universal scourge.  This tavern,