Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/215

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

been more used to the chase than to farming, and he boasted much of his rifle. He recommended his Pennsylvania whiskey as an antidote against the effects of my ducking, and I took him at his word, though he was much surprised to see me use more of it externally than internally, which I did from experience that bathing the feet, hands and head {185} with spirituous liquor of any sort, has a much better effect in preventing chill and fever, either after being wet of after violent perspiration from exercise, than taking any quantity into the stomach, which on the contrary rarely fails to bring on, or to add to inflammatory symptoms.—A little internally however I have found to be a good aid to the external application.

I found at my friendly Pennsylvanian's, a little old man named Lashley, who had taken shelter at the beginning of the gust, which being now over, he buckled on his knapsack, and we proceeded together. He had travelled on foot from Tennessee river, through a part of the state of Tennessee, quite across Kentucky, and so far in Ohio in nine days, at the rate of thirty-six miles a day. He had assisted in navigating a boat from Indian Wheeling, where he lived, to Tennessee, for which he had got thirty dollars, ten of which he had already expended on his journey so far back, though using the utmost economy. He remarked to me, that although he was upwards of sixty years of age, and apparently very poor, he had not got gratuitously a single meal of victuals in all that route. Are not hospitality and charity more nominal than real virtues?

The country for the next five miles is tolerably well improved, and there is a good brick house which is a tavern owned by one Wickerham at the first mile, and a mile further is Horn's tavern, where the stage sleeps on its route to the N. E. towards Chilicothe.

Old Lashley complaining of fatigue, we stopped at Mar-