lxxxii LIFE OF 



forced by business or absolute necessity, by which, means a great? 

 number of idle loungers are very properly kept out of the way of 

 the market folks. 



" I shall say nothing of the nature or quantity of the commodities 

 which I saw exhibited there for sale, as the season was unfavour- 

 able to a display of their productions, otherwise something better 

 than a few cakes of black maple sugar, wrapt in greasy saddle-bags, 

 some cabbage, chewing tobacco, catmint and turnip tops, a few bags 

 of meal, sassafras roots, and skinned squirrels, cut up into quarters, 

 — something better than all this, I say, in the proper season, certainly 

 covers the stalls of this market-place, in the metropolis of the fertile 

 country of Kentucky. 



" The horses of Kentucky are the hardiest in the world, not so 

 much by nature as by education and by habit. From the com- 

 mencement of their existence, they are habituated to every extreme 

 of starvation and gluttony, idleness and excessive fatigue. In 

 summer, they fare sumptuously every day. In winter, when not 

 a blade of grass is to be seen, and when the cows have deprived 

 them of the very bark and buds of every fallen tree, they are ridden 

 into town fifteen or twenty miles, through roads and sloughs that 

 would become the graves of any common animal, with a fury and 

 celerity incomprehensible by you folks on the other side of the 

 Alleghany. They are there fastened to the posts on the sides of the 

 streets and around the public square, where hundreds of them may 

 be seen, on a court-day, hanging their heads, from morning to night, 

 in deep cogitation, ruminating, perhaps, on the long expected return 

 of spring and green herbage. The country people, to their credit 

 be it spoken, are universally clad in plain homespun. Soap, how- 

 ever, appears to be a scarce article, and Hopkins' double cutter's 

 would find here a rich harvest, and produce a very improving effect. 

 Though religion here has its votaries, yet none can accuse the in- 

 habitants of this flourishing place of bigotry, in shutting out from 

 the pale of the church or churchyard any human being or animal 

 whatever. Some of these sanctuaries are open at all hours, and to 

 every visitor. The birds of heaven find a hundred passages through 

 the broken panes, and the cows and hogs a ready access on all sides. 

 The wall of separation is broken down between the living and the 

 dead, and dogs tug at the carcass of the horse on the grave of his 



