There are but few now left who have enjoyed a night in one of these
old tumble-down rooms, with A.S. Clayton, O.H. Prince, A.B.
Longstreet, and John M. Dooly. Here and there one, old, tottering, and
gray, lives to laugh at his memories of those chosen spirits of fun.
Yes, that is the word--fun--for these _ancients_ possessed a fund of
mirth-exciting humor, combined with a biting wit, which, in the
peregrinations of a long life, I have met nowhere else. Were I to
select one of these inns, it would be the old Walton Tavern, in the
mean little hamlet of Livingston in Oglethorpe County, or the old
house, kept long and indifferently, by that mountain of mortal
obesity, Billy Springer, in Sparta, Hancock County. It was here, and
when Springer presided over the fried meat and eggs of this venerable
home for the weary and hungry, after a night of it, that all were
huddled to bed like pigs in a sty.
This bulky Boniface was polite to all, but especially to an Augusta
lawyer. Freeman Walker, of that ilk, usually attended this court, and
was the great man of the week. A man of splendid abilities and
polished manners, dressed and deporting himself like a gentleman, as
he was, he shone among the lesser lights which orbed about him, a star
of the first magnitude.
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