Page:American History Told by Contemporaries, v2.djvu/421

No. 137] by fire, and the flames consume what the iron was unable to destroy. But it is enough for the small trees to be felled, and the great ones to lose their sap. This object compleated, the ground is cleared ; the air and the sun begin to operate upon that earth which is wholly formed of rotten vegetables, and teems with the latent principles of production. The grass grows rapidly ; there is pasturage for the cattle the very first year ; after which they are left to increase, or fresh ones are brought, and they are employed in tilling a piece of ground which yields the enormous increase of twenty or thirty fold. The next year the same course is repeated ; when, at the end of two years, the planter has wherewithal to subsist, and even to send some articles to market : at the end of four or five years, he completes the payment of his land, and finds himself a comfortable planter. Then his dwelling, which at first was no better than a large hut formed by a square of the trunks of trees, placed one upon another, with the intervals filled by mud, changes into a handsome wooden house, where he contrives more convenient, and certainly much cleaner apartments than those in the greatest part of our small towns. This is the work of three weeks or a month. His first habitation, that of eight and forty hours. I shall be asked, perhaps, how one man, or one family can be so quickly lodged? I answer, that in America a man is never alone, never an isolated being. The neighbours, for they are every where to be found, make it a point of hospitality to aid the new farmer. A cask of cyder drank in common, and with gaiety, or a gallon of rum, are the only recompence for these services. Such are the means by which North America, which one hundred years ago was nothing but a vast forest, is peopled with three millions of inhabitants ; and such is the immense, and certain benefit of agriculture, that notwithstanding the war, it not only maintains itself where-ever it has been established, but it extends to places which seems the least favourable to its introduction. Four years ago one might have travelled ten miles in the woods I traversed, without seeing a single habitation.