Ten miles more in the late afternoon brought us to Jonesboro, the oldest town in the State, a pretty place, with a flavor of antiquity, set picturesquely on hills, with the great mountains in sight.  People from further South find this an agreeable summering place, and a fair hotel, with odd galleries in front and rear, did not want company.  The Warren Institute for negroes has been flourishing here ever since the war.

A ride of twenty miles next day carried us to Union.  Before noon we forded the Watauga, a stream not so large as the Nollechucky, and were entertained at the big brick house of Mr. Devault, a prosperous and hospitable farmer.  This is a rich country.  We had met in the morning wagon-loads of watermelons and muskmelons, on the way to Jonesboro, and Mr. Devault set abundance of these refreshing fruits before us as we lounged on the porch before dinner.

It was here that we made the acquaintance of a colored woman, a withered, bent old pensioner of the house, whose industry (she excelled any modern patent apple-parer) was unabated, although she was by her own confession (a woman, we believe, never owns her age till she has passed this point) and the testimony of others a hundred years old.  But age had not impaired the brightness of her eyes, nor the limberness of her tongue, nor her shrewd good sense.  She talked freely about the want of decency and morality in the young colored folks of the present day.  It was n’t so when she was a girl.  Long, long time ago, she and her husband had been sold at sheriff’s sale and separated, and she never had another husband.  Not that she blamed her master so much he could n’t help it; he got in debt.  And she expounded her philosophy about the rich, and the danger they are in.  The great trouble is that when a person is rich, he can borrow money so easy, and he keeps drawin’ it out of the bank and pilin’ up the debt, like rails on top of one another, till it needs a ladder to get on to the pile, and then it all comes down in a heap, and the man has to begin on the bottom rail again.  If she’d to live her life over again, she’d lay up money; never cared much about it till now.  The thrifty, shrewd old woman still walked about a good deal, and kept her eye on the neighborhood.  Going out that morning she had seen some fence up the road that needed mending, and she told Mr. Devault that she didn’t like such shiftlessness; she didn’t know as white folks was much better than colored folks.  Slavery?  Yes, slavery was pretty bad—­she had seen five hundred niggers in handcuffs, all together in a field, sold to be sent South.

About six miles from here is a beech grove of historical interest, worth a visit if we could have spared the time.  In it is the large beech (six and a half feet around six feet from the ground) on which Daniel Boone shot a bear, when he was a rover in this region.  He himself cut an inscription on the tree recording his prowess, and it is still distinctly legible: