Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/127

 keep them in a continual supply of water. The ships engaged in this kind of traffic load, in return, with rice and cottons, the greater part of which is re-exported into Europe, the freight {10} being always higher in the northern than in the southern states. The cotton wool that they keep in the north for their own consumption is more than sufficient to supply the manufacturies, being but very few: the overplus is disposed of in the country places, where the women fabricate coarse cottons for the use of their families.

Wood is extravagantly dear at Charleston; it costs from forty to fifty shillings a cord, notwithstanding forests, which are almost boundless in extent, begin at six miles, and even at a less distance from the town, and the conveyance of it is facilitated by the two rivers at the conflux of which it is situated; on which account a great number of the inhabitants burn coals that are brought from England.

As soon as I recovered from my illness I left Charleston, and went to reside in a small plantation about ten miles from the town, where my father had formed a botanic garden. It was there he collected and cultivated, with the greatest care, the plants that he found in the long and painful travels that his ardent love for science had urged him to make, almost every year, in the different quarters of America. Ever animated with a desire of serving the country he was in, he conceived that the climate of South Carolina {11} must be favourable to the culture of several useful vegetables of the old continent, and made a memorial of them, which he read to the Agricultural Society