These reached an elevation of about a thousand feet. Above all
towered the great, dominating peak, the summit lost in the clouds
eight or nine thousand feet above. The rock-hewn roads and
cultivated land certainly gave the settlement an old-established
appearance, which was not surprising seeing that it has been
inhabited for more than a hundred years. I shall always bear a
grateful recollection of the place, because my host gave me what
I had long been a stranger to--a good, old-fashioned English
dinner of roast beef and baked potatoes. He apologized for
having no plum-pudding to crown the feast. "But, you see," he
said, "we kaint grow no corn hyar, and we'm clean run out ov
flour; hev ter make out on taters 's best we kin." I sincerely
sympathized with him on the lack of bread-stuff among them, and
wondered no longer at the avidity with which they had munched our
flinty biscuits on first coming aboard. His wife, a buxom,
motherly woman of about fifty, of dark, olive complexion, but
good features, was kindness itself; and their three youngest
children, who were at home, could not, in spite of repeated
warnings and threats, keep their eyes off me, as if I had been
some strange animal dropped from the moon.
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