They gave me all sorts of how-d'ye-does as I passed.
Girls waved their hands at me from the hind-ends of rigs and said bold things--to a boy they would not see again; but which left him blushing and thinking up retorts for the next occasion--retorts that never seemed to fit when the time came; and talkative women threw remarks at me about the roads and the weather.
Men tried half a dozen times a day to trade me out of my bay mare Fanny, or my sorrel mare Flora--they said I ought to match up with two of a color; and the crow-baits offered me would have stocked a horse-ranch.
People with oxen offered me what looked like good swaps, because they were impatient to make better time; and as I went along so stylishly I began turning over in my mind the question as to whether it might not be better to get to Iowa a little later in the year with cattle for a start than to rush the season with my fine mares and pull up standing like a gentleman at my own imaginary door.
2 As I went on to the westward, I began to see Blue Mound rising like a low mountain off my starboard bow, and I stopped at a farm in the foot-hills of the Mound where, because it was rainy, I paid four shillings for putting my horses in the stable.

There were two other movers stopping at the same place.

They had a light wagon and a yoke of good young steers, and had been out of Madison two days longer than I had been.

I noticed that they left their wagon in a clump of bushes, and that while one of them--a man of fifty or more, slept in the house, the other, a young fellow of twenty or twenty-two, lay in the wagon, and that one or the other seemed always to be on guard near the vehicle.

The older man had a long beard and a hooked nose, and seemed to be a still sort of person, until some one spoke of slavery; then he broke out in a fierce speech denouncing slaveholders, and the slavocracy that had the nation in its grip.
"You talk," said the farmer, "like a black Abolitionist." "I'm so black an Abolitionist," said he, "that I'd be willing to shoulder a gun any minute if I thought I could wipe out the curse of slavery." The farmer was terribly scandalized at this, and when the old man walked away to his wagon, he said to the young man and me that that sort of talk would make trouble and ruin the nation; and that he didn't want any more of it around his place.
"Well," said the traveler, "you won't have any more of it from us.