cxxx 
LIFE OF WILSON. 
the whole running streams, with which the surface of this 
country evidently once abounded, have been drained off to a 
great depth, and now murmur among these lower regions, se- 
cluded from the day. One forenoon I rode nineteen miles 
without seeing water; while my faithful horse looked round, 
but in vain, at every hollow, with a wishful and languishing 
eye, for that precious element. These barrens furnished me 
with excellent sport in shooting grous, which abound here in 
great numbers; and in the delightful groves that here and there 
rise majestically from these plains, I found many new subjects 
for my Ornithology. I observed all this day, far to the right, 
a range of high rocky detached hills, or knobs, as they are 
called, that skirt the barrens, as if they had been once the 
boundaries of the great lake that formerly covered this vast 
plain. These, I was told, abound with stone coal and cop- 
peras. I crossed Big Barren river in a ferry boat, where it 
was about one hundred yards wide; and passed a small village 
called Bowling Green, near which I rode my horse up to the 
summit of one of these high insulated rocky hills, or knobs, 
which overlooked an immense circumference of country, 
spreading around bare and leafless, except where the groves 
appeared, in which there is usually water. Fifteen miles from 
this, induced by the novel character of the country, I put up 
for several days, at the house of a pious and worthy presbyte- 
rian, whence I made excursions, in all directions, through the 
surrounding country. Between this and Red river the coun- 
try had a bare and desolate appearance. Caves continued to 
be numerous; and report made some of them places of conceal- 
ment for the dead bodies of certain strangers who had disap- 
peared there. One of these lies near the banks of the Red ri- 
ver, and belongs to a person of the name of , a man 
of notoriously bad character, and strongly suspected, even by 
his neighbours, of having committed a foul murder of this kind, 
which was related to me with all its minutiae of horrors. As 
this man’s house stands by the road side, I was induced, by 
motives of curiosity, to stop and take a peep of him. On my 
