“Why, he said he was sick, but if he was, he got well mighty easy after he stopped working.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“Oh, yes, he’s going round here.”
“What is he doing?”
“Well, he’s just goin’ round.”
“Is he at work for any one else?”
“Reckon not—no, he’s just goin’ round from one place to another.”
At supper and breakfast surprise was expressed that I declined coffee, and more still that I drank water instead of milk. The woman observed, “’twas cheap boarding me.” The man said he must get home a couple more cows; they ought to drink milk more, coffee was so high now, and he believed milk would be just as healthy. The woman asked the price of coffee in New York; I could not tell her, but said I believed it was uncommonly high; the crops had been short. She asked how coffee grew. I told her as well as I was able, but concluded by saying I had never seen it growing. “Don’t you raise coffee in New York?” she asked; “I thought that was where it came from.”
The butter was excellent. I said so, and asked if they never made any for sale. The woman said she could make “as good butter as any ever was made in the yarth, but she couldn’t get anything for it; there warn’t many of the merchants would buy it, and those that did, would only take it at eight cents a pound for goods.” The man said the only thing he could ever sell for ready money was cattle. Drovers bought them for the New York market, and lately they were very high—four cents a pound. He had driven cattle all the way to Charleston himself, to sell them, and only got four cents a pound there. He had sold corn here for twelve and a half cents a bushel.
Although the man could not read, he had honoured letters by calling one of his children “Washington Irving;” another was known as Matterson (Madison?). He had never tried manuring land for crops, but said, “I do believe it is a good plan, and if I live I mean to try it sometime.”