My friend shook his head mournfully; he was not convinced, but he knew the bent of my temper, and was well aware that all he could say would now be useless.

The natural buoyancy of our spirits would not, however, allow us to be grave long; and when the loud shouts of the doctor announced that he had caught a sight of the river, we spurred our horses, and soon rejoined our company.  We had by this time issued from the swampy canebrakes, and were entering a lane between two rich cotton-fields, and at the end of which flowed the Red River; not the beautiful, clear, and transparent stream running upon a rocky and sandy bed, as in the country inhabited by the Comanches and Pawnee Picts, and there termed the Colorado of the West; but a red and muddy, yet rapid stream.  We agreed that we should not ferry the river that evening, but seek a farm, and have a feast before parting company.  We learned from a negro, that we were in a place called Lost Prairie, and that ten minutes’ ride down the bank of the stream would carry us to Captain Finn’s plantation.  We received this news with wild glee, for Finn was a celebrated character, one whose life was so full of strange adventures in the wilderness, that it would fill volumes with hair-breadth encounters and events of thrilling interest.

Captain Finn received us with a cordial welcome, for unbounded hospitality is the invariable characteristic of the older cotton planters.  A great traveller himself, he knew the necessities of a travelling life, and, before conducting us to the mansion, he guided us to the stables, where eight intelligent slaves, taking our horses, rubbed them down before our eyes, and gave them a plentiful supply of fodder and a bed of fresh straw.

“That will do till they are cool,” said our kind host; “to-night they will have their grain and water; let us now go to the old woman and see what she can give us for supper.”

A circumstance worthy of remark is, that, in the western states, a husband always calls his wife the old woman, and she calls him the old man, no matter how young the couple may be.  I have often heard men of twenty-five sending their slaves upon some errand “to the old woman,” who was not probably more than eighteen years old.  A boy of ten years calls his parents in the same way.  “How far to Little Rock?” I once asked of a little urchin; “I don’t know,” answered he, “but the old ones will tell you.”  A few yards farther I met the “old ones;” they were both young people, not much more than twenty.

In Mrs. Finn we found a stout and plump farmer’s wife, but she was a lady in her manners.  Born in the wilderness, the daughter of one bold pioneer and married to another, she had never seen anything but woods, canebrakes, cotton, and negroes, and yet, in her kindness and hospitality, she displayed a refinement of feeling and good breeding.  She was daughter of the celebrated Daniel Boone, a name which has acquired a reputation even in Europe.  She immediately ransacked her pantry, her hen-roost, and garden, and when we returned from the cotton-mill, to which our host, in his farmer’s pride, had conducted us, we found, upon an immense table, a meal which would have satisfied fifty of those voracious Bostonians whom we had met with the day before at the table d’hote.