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534
Mississippi Historical Society.
hour a charming blue-eyed girl brought us a tumbler of potato beer that sparkled like champagne and rather archly intimated that there were hot potatoes in the ashes if we felt like eating one. The beer was admirable, and we were told that good whiskey, molasses and vinegar were sometimes made of potatoes.
At length we turned in. The little chamber we were shown to was the perfection of neatness. The floor was sprinkled over with white sand. A small mirror stood on the wall, from which was suspended a sort of napkin tastily worked all over. Above was a rosary of bird eggs of every color, and over the window and pinned along the white curtains of the bed were wreaths of flowers, now dry indeed, but retaining their beautiful tints and making a very pretty ornament. An old oaken chest, highly polished and waxed, set in a comer, and over that a range of shelves stored with quilts, comforts, coverlids of many colors, the work of the industrious household. The pillows were bordered with fringed network and the sheets as white as the untrod snow; but the bed itself, though soft and pleasant, was made of potato vines. Either from over fatigue, our late and hearty supper, or from our imagination being somewhat excited, we rested badly; the night-mare brooded over us; we dreamed that we had turned into a big potato, and that some one was digging us up. Perspiring, struggling, we clinched the bed and finally leaped up gasping for breath. It was some time before the horrid idea would quit us. In the morning, owing to the drenching of the previous day, we were an invalid and threatened with fever and sore throat. The kind old lady insisted on our remaining in bed and she immediately bound a mashed roasted potato, just from the ashes, moistened with warm vinegar, to our neck and gave profusely a hot tea made of dried potato vines. These applications acted like a charm, and with the addition of a few simples from the woods were all the remedial agents ever used by this happy family. They could scarcely form a conception of a physician such as we see him here, riding day and night, keeping half a dozen horses, following the pestilence to enrich science with its spoils, attending the poor from charity, accumulating fortunes from the infirmities of the human family, but not unfrequently losing life in the effort. The mistress of the house had never known
A Trip Through the Piney Woods.?Claiborne.	535
a fever, old as she was, her blooming daughters looked incredulous when we described the ravages of disease in other parts .of the State, and certain it is that none of them had ever before seen one the worse from having ridden six hours in wet clothes. When we took leave of our kind friends it was in vain that we offered them compensation. They welcomed us to everything and we set off with our pockets filled with biscuits, jerked venison and potato chips, a sort of crystallized preserves steeped
in syrup and then dried in the sun.
Our adventure with the wolves the previous night excited ' no surprise. They abound in that region and have their dens ;in waste and desolate places. A strange story relative to them is told in the East. Some years since a wedding being about to take place in a thinly settled neighborhood it was necessary ' to send some twelve miles for an old ?negro fiddler,? who was : indispensable at every frolic, quilting or house-raising for forty miles around. A wild, hilly, unsettled country lay between them. In the meantime the company collected, the Squire performed the ceremony, the groom had taken half a dozen . ?horns? all round with his friends and the jests at his expense
?	had all been repeated and laughed at; the bride and the young ladies sat ranged around the room like so many beautiful statues pinned to the walls; the bashful gallants stood grouped about the doors and windows anxious to be in but fearing to approach and urging each other ?to break the ice.? The Squire and a knot of old ?uns were talking politics and, as the evening was warm, guzzling every ten minutes from a huge, hump-shouldered, short-necked, four-sided bottle, several of which stood on a broad flat stump before the door; while a score of matrons in white caps might be seen by the blaze of lightwood torches ? bustling about the supper table in an adjacent house. At length some of the girls began to yawn; the pretty bride herself looked drowsy; a scraping of feet was heard in the gallery and one or two impatient young bucks, anxious to show their keeping, commenced shuffling, cracking their heels together and cutting the pigeon wing. Still no fiddler came. Hour after hour rolled by?supper was deferred?the drinks came faster and sweeter and stronger?the yawning more visible among the ladies?the talking louder among the gentlemen on the