Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/305

 *gard to their domestic affairs, and follow the same plans of agriculture. Notwithstanding there are many of them whose moral characters, perhaps, are not so unspotted as those of the western inhabitants, it is probably altered by associating with the Scotch and Irish who come every year in great numbers to settle in the country, and {284} who teach them a part of their vices and defects, the usual attendants on a great population. The major part of these new adventurers go into the upper country, where they engage to serve, for a year or two, those persons who have paid the captain of the ship for their passage.

{285} CHAP. XXXII

Low part of the Carolines and Georgia.—Agriculture.—Population.—Arrival at Charleston.

low country of the two Carolinas extends from the borders of the sea for a hundred and twenty or a hundred and fifty miles, widening as it gets towards the south. The space that this extent embraces presents an even and regular soil, formed by a blackish sand, rather deep in parts, in which there are neither stones nor flints; in consequence of which they seldom shoe their horses in that part of the United States. Seven-tenths of the country are {286} covered with pines of one species, or pinus palustris, which, as the soil is drier and lighter, grow loftier and not so branchy. These trees, frequently twenty feet distant from each other, are not damaged by the fire that they make here annually in the woods, at the commencement of spring, to burn the grass and other plants that the frost has killed. These pines, encumbered with very few branches, and which split even, are preferred to other trees to form fences for plantations. Notwithstanding the sterility of the land where they grow, they