Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/303

 they cultivate no other but the peach. The other kinds of trees, such as pears, apricots, plumbs, cherries, almonds, mulberries, nuts, and gooseberries, are very little known, except by name. Many of the inhabitants who are independent would be happy to procure some of them, but the distance from the sea-ports renders it very difficult. The major part of the inhabitants do not even cultivate vegetables; and out of twenty there is scarcely one of them that plants a small bed of cabbages; and when they do, it is in the same field as the Indian wheat.

In Upper Carolina the surface of the soil is covered with a kind of grass, which grows in greater abundance as the forests are more open. The woods are also like a common, where the inhabitants turn out their cattle, which they know again by their {281} private mark. Several persons have in their flocks a variety of poll oxen, which are not more esteemed than those of the common species. In the whole course of my travels I never saw any that could be compared to those I have seen in England, which beyond doubt proceeds from the little care that the inhabitants take of them, and from what these animals suffer during the summer, when they are cruelly tormented by an innumerable multitude of ticks and muskitos, and in the winter, through the want of grass, which dries up through the effect of the first frosts. These inconveniences are still more sensible, during the summer, in the low country, through the extreme heat of the climate. The result is, that the cows give but little milk, and are dry at the end of three or four months. In the environs of Philadelphia and New York, where they bestow the same care upon them as in England, they are, on the contrary, as fine, and give as great a quantity of milk.