Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/219

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In an hour I was at Talbot's, which is a good two story house of squared logs, with a large barn and excellent stabling, surrounded by a well opened and luxuriant farm, with a fine run of meadow.

The landlord and his family are seven years from Nenagh in the county Tipperary, and is the first Irish settler, I had seen on my tour, from any other part than the north of Ireland. He had kept Ellis's ferry on the Ohio, where Powers now resides, for some years, and has lately rented this house and farm from Mr. Willis of Chilicothe, the contractor for carrying the mail from Wheeling to Lexington.

Observing a new stage wagon in the yard, my host informed me that it was one which Mr. Willis intended in a few days to commence running between Chilicothe and Ellis's ferry, so that it, and the one already established, will each run once a week on different days.

I shifted my wet clothes, and then (there being no doctor nearer than Chilicothe, twenty-four miles) prescribed medicine and regimen for Talbot's little daughter, who was suffering under a severe and dangerous attack of a nervous fever.

Three young men on horseback arrived soon after me, and were shewn into the same room. They talked a little largely, according to a very common custom among young travellers, intimating that they were just returning from the Olympian springs in Kentucky, a place of very fashionable resort, where they had been on a party of pleasure, and where they {190} had attended more to cards, billiards, horse jockeying, &c. than to the use of the waters for medicinal purposes. I am however much mistaken, if they had not been travelling on business, and took the opportunity of visiting those celebrated springs, which are the Bath of Kentucky, and which they now affected to speak of as the