66 TRAVELS IN THE CONFEDERATION 



streams and creeks are indeed in many places a sub- 

 stitute for land-carriage ; but for the rest, the reason 

 lies merely in the great negligence with which the 

 Virginians, and all Americans, treat their horses as 

 well as their other useful animals, making it impossible 

 for them to show a better condition. With the ex- 

 ception of those horses upon which as racers a high 

 value is placed, all the others are let run about in the 

 fields for pasture, without giving them in the hardest 

 winter any protection against the inclemencies of the 

 weather (and this even in the more northern provinces, 

 Pensylvania, New York, Rhode Island), and many of 

 these poor beasts are actually forced to get what little 

 nourishment they can from under ice and snow. It 

 appears, however, that most of the horses in America 

 have not that delicacy of taste which causes European 

 horses to refuse bad and unclean feed. Here they de- 

 vour everything without distinction, the meanest hay 

 and even their own excreta. In the army horses have 

 many times been seen to eat salted meat, and in Canada 

 they as well as horned cattle are fed the winter through 

 on little frozen fishes. 



On the south side of the James River, exactly oppo- 

 site Richmond, stands a small town called Manchester. 

 Between the two places the river is not wide, and in 

 crossing one scarcely observes whence the current 

 comes, the numerous rocks and small islands in and 

 about the falls seeming at a distance to make up one 

 continuous whole. A circumstance which it has been 

 proposed to make use of in the construction of a bridge 

 over the falls ; for these rocks have an owner, who 

 bought in for a few hundred pounds the lower part of 

 the falls together with a narrow strip along either 



