Heistant is a Pennsylvania German, and has a good and plentiful house, in a very pleasant situation, called the Sinking springs, from a great natural curiosity near it. On the side of a low hill, now in cultivation, are three large holes, each about twenty feet deep and twenty feet diameter, about sixty paces apart, with a subterraneous communication by which the water is conveyed from one to the other, and issues in a fine rivulet at a fourth opening near the {188} house, where Heistant’s milk house is placed very judiciously. The spring is copious and the water very fine.[137]
After a good breakfast I walked on alone, and at about a mile, I entered on a dreary forest having first passed Irwin’s tavern, a pleasant situation where the stage sleeps going towards the S. westward. Three miles from Irwin’s, is over very broken, but well timbered hills, to the left of which on Brush creek, I was informed, that there is a fine settlement, but it is not in sight of the road. The next two miles was through a beech bottom, which was rendered so miry by the rain that poured on me all the time, that it was most laborious walking through it. About the middle of it, I met three men in hunting shirts with each an axe in his hand. Their appearance in that solitary situation was no ways agreeable; however, we gave each other good day, and they told me that old Lashley had desired them to inform me that he would await me at Bradley’s, the next house, but when I came there, he had just departed, so that I might have very soon overtaken him, had I not preferred being alone, to effect which the more certainly, I stopped to rest, as it was a house of private entertainment. Bradley and his wife are about sixteen years from Stewartstown, county Tyrone in Ireland, and have a daughter lately married to a young shoemaker named Irons at the next cabin, where I stopped to get my shoes mended. I here found a dozen of stout young fellows who had been at work repairing the road, and were now sheltering themselves from the increasing storm, and listening to some indifferent musick made by their host on a tolerably good violin. I proposed taking the violin while he repaired my shoes. He consented and sat down to work, and in a few minutes I had all the lads jigging it on the floor merrily; Irons himself, as soon as he had repaired the shoes, jumping up and joining them.
{189} Seeing no prospect of the storm ceasing, I satisfied my shoemaker for his trouble, with something more agreeable to him than my musick, and then set off to reach Talbot’s, said to be a good tavern, three miles further.
The road led over the highest hill which I had yet seen since I left the Ohio, and afterwards through a level, well wooded, but thinly inhabited country.
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 sole cause of their journey.[138] I listened with much amusement to their dashing conversation, knowing tolerably well how to estimate it, in a country where vanity in the young and ambition among the more advanced in life are predominant features. I do not confine this remark to the state of Ohio, where probably there is less of either than in the older states, in which, particularly to the southward of New England, they seem to be national characteristics.
We supped together and were then shewn to our beds by the landlord, who probably thought that the custom of two in a bed was general in America, by his shewing the whole four into a room with two beds: I followed him however down stairs, and soon had a good bed prepared for me in a room by myself.