Long before supper was ready, nearly nine o'clock, we had almost lost
interest in it.
Meantime two other guests had arrived, a couple of
drovers from North Carolina, who brought into the circle - by this
time a wood-fire had been kindled in the sitting-room, which
contained a bed, an almanac, and some old copies of a newspaper - a
rich flavor of cattle, and talk of the price of steers. As to
politics, although a presidential campaign was raging, there was
scarcely an echo of it here. This was Johnson County, Tennessee, a
strong Republican county but dog-gone it, says Mr. Egger, it's no
use to vote; our votes are overborne by the rest of the State. Yes,
they'd got a Republican member of Congress, - he'd heard his name, but
he'd forgotten it. The drover said he'd heard it also, but he didn't
take much interest in such things, though he wasn't any Republican.
Parties is pretty much all for office, both agreed. Even the
Professor, who was traveling in the interest of Reform, couldn't wake
up a discussion out of such a state of mind.
Alas! the supper, served in a room dimly lighted with a smoky lamp,
on a long table covered with oilcloth, was not of the sort to arouse
the delayed and now gone appetite of a Reformer, and yet it did not
lack variety: cornpone (Indian meal stirred up with water and heated
through), hot biscuit, slack-baked and livid, fried salt-pork
swimming in grease, apple-butter, pickled beets, onions and cucumbers
raw, coffee (so-called), buttermilk, and sweet milk when specially
asked for (the correct taste, however, is for buttermilk), and pie.
This was not the pie of commerce, but the pie of the country, - two
thick slabs of dough, with a squeezing of apple between.
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