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 have known lofty trees spring up from kernels, which bore apples from eight to nine inches in circumference.

At Bedford there are scarce a hundred and twenty houses in the whole, and those but of a miserable {41} appearance, most of them being built of wood. This little town, like all the rest on that road, trades in all kinds of corn, flour, &c. which, with salt provisions, are the only articles they sell for exportation. During the war, in the time of the French revolution, the inhabitants found it more to their advantage to send their corn, &c. to Pittsburgh, there to be sent by the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, or embark them for the Carribbees, than to send them to Philadelphia or Baltimore; notwithstanding it is not computed to be more than two hundred miles from Bedford to Philadelphia, and a hundred and fifty from Bedford to Baltimore, whilst the distance from Bedford to New Orleans is about two thousand two hundred miles; viz. a hundred miles by land to Pittsburgh, and two thousand one hundred miles by water from Pittsburgh to the mouth of the Mississippi. It is evident, according to this calculation, that the navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi is very easy, and by far less expensive, since it compensates for the enormous difference that exists between those two distances. The situation of New Orleans, with respect to the Carribbees, by this rule, gives this town the most signal advantage over all the ports eastward of the United States; and in proportion as {42} the new western states increase in population, New Orleans will become the centre of an immense commerce. Other facts will still rise up to the support of this observation.

On the following day (the 1st of July) we left Bedford very early in the morning. The heat was excessive; the