A COTTAGE IN THE WOODS.
On leaving the city several gentlemen gave me the pleasure of their company for some distance, among them Alexander Wilsey, who before the war had been a scholar of mine back in Schodack, New York.
Meeting him was only one of many similar experiences, for here and there along my route I found old acquaintances, whose faces I had never expected to see again.
After a ride of six hours, I rode into Black River and found it quite an enterprising village, but hardly suggesting its old position as the principal port in the county.
Sixty-second Day.
Huron House,
Huron, Ohio,
July Twelfth.
Left the aspiring village of Black River or "Lorraine," as the inhabitants are disposed to call it, at nine o'clock, stopping at the Lake House, Vermillion, for dinner. The scenery is very attractive along the Lake Shore Road between Black River and Huron, and I followed it all day and for two or three hours after nightfall, covering a distance of twenty miles. My sense of the beautiful was somewhat dimmed, however, by the cloud of mosquitoes which beset my path, and which were hardly persuaded to part company at the hotel. There were nearly seven hundred people in Huron, and I must confess that upon entering the slumbering village I began to be generous in the hope that my attentive little tormentors would adopt the principle of equal distribution among the inhabitants. But for the rapacious mosquito the course of the traveller by night upon these highways is serene and uneventful, for, of all the hordes of wolves, wildcats, buffaloes and panthers that made their homes about this part of the country in the times of the Indian, scarcely a vestige remains.