The scene of this little lesson in horsemanship was the old town of Abingdon, in southwest Virginia, on the Virginia and East Tennessee railway; a town of ancient respectability, which gave birth to the Johnstons and Floyds and other notable people; a town, that still preserves the flavor of excellent tobacco and, something of the easy-going habits of the days of slavery, and is a sort of educational center, where the young ladies of the region add the final graces of intellectual life in moral philosophy and the use of the globes to their natural gifts.  The mansion of the late and left Floyd is now a seminary, and not far from it is the Stonewall Jackson Institute, in the midst of a grove of splendid oaks, whose stately boles and wide-spreading branches give a dignity to educational life.  The distinction of the region is its superb oak-trees.  As it was vacation in these institutions of learning, the travelers did not see any of the vines that traditionally cling to the oak.

The Professor and the Friend of Humanity were about starting on a journey, across country southward, through regions about which the people of Abingdon could give little useful information.  If the travelers had known the capacities and resources of the country, they would not have started without a supply train, or the establishment of bases of provisions in advance.  But, as the Professor remarked, knowledge is something that one acquires when he has no use for it.  The horses were saddled; the riders were equipped with flannel shirts and leather leggings; the saddle-bags were stuffed with clean linen, and novels, and sonnets of Shakespeare, and other baggage, it would have been well if they had been stuffed with hard-tack, for in real life meat is more than raiment.

The hotel, in front of which there is cultivated so much of what the Germans call sitzfleisch, is a fair type of the majority of Southern hotels, and differs from the same class in the North in being left a little more to run itself.  The only information we obtained about it was from its porter at the station, who replied to the question, “Is it the best?” “We warrant you perfect satisfaction in every respect.”  This seems to be only a formula of expression, for we found that the statement was highly colored.  It was left to our imagination to conjecture how the big chambers of the old house, with their gaping fireplaces, might have looked when furnished and filled with gay company, and we got what satisfaction we could out of a bygone bustle and mint-julep hilarity.  In our struggles with the porter to obtain the little items of soap, water, and towels, we were convinced that we had arrived too late, and that for perfect satisfaction we should have been here before the war.  It was not always as now.  In colonial days the accommodations and prices at inns were regulated by law.  In the old records in the court-house we read that if we had been here in 1777, we could have had a gallon of good rum for sixteen shillings; a