III.J PREPARATION. 



thcr. The owner had been preparing himself 

 for beating all his neighbours in this prime crop, 

 and he saw all his hopes blasted from this miser- 

 able cause. I went and raked round some of the 

 hills with my finger, and we found a dozen grubs 

 together in some places, lying under the clods, 

 contemplating the pleasures of the feast of the 

 next evening or night. In a country where nu- 

 merous hands could have been obtained at a 

 moderate expense, the crop might have been 

 saved to a considerable extent. Such means 

 were not at command here) and when I saw 

 my friend in the fall of the year, I found that he 

 had not had five bushels upon an acre, where he 

 ought to have had fifty at least. 



42. This danger must always exist if you plant 

 upon a once ploughing in land matted with 

 weeds or with grass; and, therefore, I recom- 

 mend by all means, the avoiding of such tillage 

 of the land for corn. If my friend, the Quaker, 

 had sowed the land with wheat, or rye, or barley, 

 the grub might have done some mischief, even 

 amidst such a superabundance of plants; but in the 

 case of Indian Corn, where the number of plants 

 must be neither more nor less ; where the num- 

 ber must be actually counted, and their distances 

 geometrically fixed, the depredations must be 

 fatal. But, the corn is by no means nice like 

 barley : it does not require a previous sheep-fold- 



