ALEXANDER WILSON. 
Ixxxiii 
spectators with the perpetual dread that they will tumble about 
their ears, contribute also, by their number and bulk, to shut out 
the light, and to spread around a reverential gloom, producing a 
melancholy and chilling effect, — a very good disposition of mind, 
certainly, for a man to enter a court of justice in. One or two 
solitary individuals stole along the damp and silent floor ; and I could 
just descry, elevated at the opposite extremity of the building, 
the judges sitting like spiders in a window corner, dimly dis- 
tinguishable through the intermediate gloom. The market-place, 
which stands a little to the westward of this, stretches over the 
whole breadth of the square ; is built of brick, something like that 
of Philadelphia, but is unpaved and unfinished. In wet weather, 
you sink over the shoes in mud at every step ; and here, again, 
the wisdom of the police is manifest, — nobody, at such times, will 
wade in there unless 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 unfavourable 
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 
