Those that are turned loose down the stream make very poor eating, for their life diet of liver and lights renders their meat very tasteless. It evidently needs the piquancy of a spider or fly to give a true gamey flavor. Just before reaching Lima, I stopped at Mr. Augustus Metcalf's, to make inquiries about the roads, and his son Willard, being a wheelman, kindly invited me to stay over night. My short visit with them will always be remembered with pleasure.
All the way from Syracuse, in fact all the way from Albany to Buffalo, I took the old, original turnpike. No matter whether I finally decided to take the "lower" road between intermediate places, or the "upper" road or the "middle" road or the "river" road or the "ridge" road or the "middle ridge" road, or a plank, clay, sand, or gravel road; whatever road I happened to be on some old farmer would soon tell me I was traveling on the "old original turnpike between Albany and Buffalo." One went back so far as to say that the said turnpike followed an old Indian trail, and they all seemed to take pride in mentioning the fact that their farms are situated on what was once such a celebrated thoroughfare. But there is another fact in regard to old highways that rests on a more substantial foundation than the disputed question as to which is the "old original." The main street leading out of Utica west towards Syracuse is called Genesee street, into Syracuse it is East Genesee, out of Syracuse West Genesee, and so on through Auburn, I think, and all the principal places until Buffalo is reached by going into the city by the same Genesee street.