us with their company at supper, and were both much better bred, and better informed than most of the tavern ladies we had seen since we left Pittsburgh.
There were some other ladies and some children in the house from Washington, who were here for the benefit of drinking the waters of the salt spring, which are esteemed efficacious in some disorders. They are frequented by people from different parts of the state, as both a cure and antidote for every disorder incident to the human frame. I believe them to be perfectly neutral: They are impregnated with sulphur, and smell and taste exactly like the bilge water in a ship's hold, of course they are very nauseous. They act sometimes as a cathartick, and sometimes as an emetick, but without causing either griping, or sickness of the stomach.
There are seven furnaces wrought here, but the water which lies at the surface is not near so strong as that at the salt lick near the Ohio, each furnace here making only about twenty-five bushels of salt per week. The Blue lick salt is much whiter and handsomer than the other, but it only sells at the same price. Each furnace rents at about three hundred dollars a year.
{155} These licks were much frequented by buffaloes and deer, the former of which have been destroyed or terrified from the country. It is only fourteen or fifteen years since no other except buffaloe or bear meat was used by the inhabitants of this country.[117]
