Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/254

 We were lost twice. The people seem to know nothing of time, and distance of places from each other; some telling us it was ten, when it was two, and three, when it was twelve o'clock; and as to distance, twenty when it was twenty-seven, and fifteen, when it was ten miles to Harmony. I expected to camp out all night, with no means of getting a fire. I saw nothing but good land, and (where any) fine corn; but no comfortable dwellings; all, miserable little log-holes, having neither springs nor mill-streams. We were very courteously shewn our way by a worshipful magistrate of Indiana, at work by the road side, hewing and splitting wood.

We rested, twenty minutes, at the log of one of Cobbett's Yankee farmers, with a fine family of boys, big enough for men, and handsome, sprightly, and free-looking, as ever walked the earth. I would have given something for a picture of them, being self-taught shoemakers, butchers, wheelwrights, carpenters, and what not, and having cleared, from 320 acres, 60 acres, and cropped them twice in two years. The mother sat, smoking her pipe, fat and easy. The father is ready to sell {264} out at 1,200 dollars; a fair price, says Mr. Ingle. They think well of this country, but were able to grow more wheat per acre in Pennsylvania; there, thirty-four, here, twenty to twenty-four bushels an acre; they can have seventy-five cents at home, or carrying it twenty miles or less, one dollar a bushel, for wheat. The old fellow says that the Harmonites do their business of all kinds better than any body else.

I saw, on the Harmony lands and fields, of great size, wheat, finer and thicker, planted with two bushels, than in England with three and a half bushels per acre. The fields, however, lie in a vale of prodigious richness.

I reached Harmony at dusk, and found a large and