Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/383

Rh the land. The forest and the ocean set limitations to the aboriginal American. The Atlantic once crossed by the agricultural Europeans, though it served to hold them to their new home, became their highway of communication with the world. To them it was no longer "a gap in the belt of human habitation."

The Teutonic blood evinced its trait of dogged persistence in the settlement of the land. Acre after acre of the primeval woodland was cleared and planted. Of the species indigenous to the new country only maize and tobacco became rivals of the old-world culture plants. We can picture to ourselves the rude farm lands of the first period of settlement, with stumps scattered through the fields, charred and blackened in many places by the firing of the fallen growth, with the maize and the English grain springing up; the kitchen-garden of old-world vegetables and herbs; the dooryard blooms—wallflower, daffodil, marigold, larkspur, and other sweet, homely flowers brought from across the sea; the young orchards with their seedling fruit trees or newly set-out transplantings of peach, apple, plum and pear. Most of the houses at this period were built of rough-hewn logs or sawed planks, while some of the more pretentious were of stone or brick. Peter Kalm, the Swedish traveler, has left us a picture of the countryside about the Delaware in the middle of the eighteenth century, after three quarters of a century of settlement. Speaking of the farms near Philadelphia, he says in one place:

A month later (in October) he writes:

The "worm fence" appears to have been a feature of the farm lands in Kalm's time, at least in the middle and southern regions. He comments at some length on the wastefulness of wood in the construction of these worm fences.