The conversation then subsided into a more placid mood, but lost none of its genial, good humor. Refreshments were soon set before us, and while partaking of them I gathered from our hostess that she was a Vermont country-girl, who, some three years before, had been induced by liberal pay to come South as a teacher. A sister accompanied her, and about a year after their arrival, she married a neighboring planter. Wishing to be near her sister, our hostess had also married and settled down for life in that wild region. "I like the country very well," she added; "it's a great sight easier living here than in Vermont; but I do hate these lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing niggers; they are so slow, and so careless, and so dirty, that I sometimes think they will worry the very life out of me. I do believe I'm the hardest mistress in all the district."
I learned from her that a majority of the teachers at the South are from the North, and principally, too, from New England. Teaching is a very laborious employment there, far more so than with us, for the Southerners have no methods like ours, and the same teacher usually has to hear lessons in branches all the way from Greek and Latin to the simple A B C. The South has no system of public instruction; no common schools; no means of placing within the reach of the sons and daughters of the poor even the elements of knowledge. While the children of the wealthy are most carefully educated, it is the policy of the ruling class to keep the great mass of the people in ignorance; and so long as this policy continues, so long will that section be as far behind the North as it now is, in all that constitutes true prosperity and greatness.
The afternoon wore rapidly and pleasantly away in the genial society of our wayside-friends. Politics were discussed (our host was a Union man), the prospects of the turpentine crop talked over, the recent news canvassed, the usual neighborly topics touched upon, and—I hesitate to confess it—a considerable quantity of corn whiskey disposed of, before the Colonel discovered, all at once, that it was six o'clock, and we were still seventeen miles from the railway station. Arraying ourselves again in our dried garments, we bade a hasty but regretful "good-bye" to our hospitable entertainers, and once more took to the road.
The storm had cleared away, but the ground was heavy with the recent rain, and our horses were sadly jaded with the ride of the morning. We gave them the reins, and, jogging on at their leisure, it was ten o'clock at night before they landed us at the little hamlet of W—— Station, in the state of North Carolina.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE RAILWAY STATION.
A large hotel, or station-house, and about a dozen log shanties made up the village. Two of these structures were negro-cabins; two were small groceries, in which the vilest alcoholic compounds were sold at a bit (ten cents) a glass; one was a lawyer's office, in which was the post-office, and a justice's court, where, once a month, the small offenders of the vicinity "settled up their accounts;" one was a tailoring and clothing establishment, where breeches were patched at a dime a stitch, and payment taken in tar and turpentine; and the rest were private dwellings of one apartment, occupied by the grocers, the tailor, the switch-tenders, the postmaster, and the negro attachés of the railroad. The church and the school-house—the first buildings to go up in a Northern village—I have omitted to enumerate, because—they were not there.
One of the natives told me that the lawyer was a "stuck-up critter;" "he don't live; he don't—he puts-up at th' hotel." And the hotel! Would Shakspeare, had he have known it, have written of taking one's ease at his inn? It was a long, framed building, two stories high, with a piazza extending across the side and a front door crowded as closely into one corner as the width of the joist would permit. Under the piazza, ranged along the wall, was a low bench, occupied by about forty tin wash-basins and water-pails, and with coarse, dirty crash towels suspended on rollers above it. By the side of each of these towels hung a comb and a brush, to which a lock of everybody's hair was clinging, forming in the total a stock sufficient to establish any barber in the wig business.
It was, as I have said, ten o'clock when we reached the Station. Throwing the bridles of our horses over the hitching-posts at the door, we at once made our way to the bar-room. That apartment, which was in the rear of the building, and communicated with by a long, narrow passage, was filled almost to suffocation, when we entered, by a cloud of tobacco smoke, the fumes of bad whiskey, and a crowd of drunken chivalry, through whom the Colonel with great difficulty elbowed his way to the counter, where "mine host" and two assistants were dispensing "liquid death," at the rate of ten cents a glass, and of ten glasses a minute.