Page:Diary of ten years.djvu/75

 59 Land. I am within the limit when I tell you that for even a small establishment like mine, where everything is to be purchased, it is necessary to have between £200 and £300 a year.

Our means will be greater and our wants less as our gardens and crops become productive. My stock of shoes for myself and people is already exhausted, and the price is 18s. per pair. Clothes and provisions, as in all infant societies, are of course our chief wants, but in some things money goes a great way. Wine, tea, and sugar are cheap. F— talks of sending goods here on commission—an excellent speculation; in shoes alone a profit of 150 per cent. might be effected.

As to clothing, black and blue clothes are the most saleable. Our medical men, lawyers, clergymen, and those in mourning, as among you, wear black; and there are persons here of each of the learned professions. The Government officers and naval and military men wear blue cloth coats with gilt crown buttons, and blue frocks and trousers—on great occasions, white duck trousers; but there is some hazard in this speculation, unless on a small scale.

Substantial clothing seems to be the taste of our sensible people, who are good judges of such matters. Blue striped shirts, shoes, boots, buskins, and corduroy trousers, meet with ready sale. We are in great want of light black beaver hats, which every one who can get them wears; but we can procure no male headpieces here, except some villanous-looking silk ones of an old-fashioned shape. In the country, or in undress, little attention is paid to mere ornament; but in company, or on state occasions, we are a very well-dressed and particular people.

As to the ladies—I suppose you have hitherto been in the habit of mistaking them for Hottentot dames, and consider them suitably appareled in linsey-wolsey, or "in druggets drest of thirteen-pence a yard;" but our fair ones of the upper grades are of a very different class indeed: but, alas! alas! I cannot enumerate any of the thousand articles which they