Part III.] Morris Birrbeck, Esq. dl9 



imagine your feelings at putting down the item of dung- 

 carting, trifling as you make it appear upon paper. 

 You now recollect my words when 1 last had the 

 pleasure of seeing you, in Catherine-street, a few days 

 before the departure of us both. I then dreaded the 

 dung-cart, and recommended the Tullian System to 

 you, by which you would have the same crops every 

 year, without manure ; but, unfortunately for my ad- 

 vice, you sincerely believed your land would be already 

 too rich, and that your main difficulty would be, not to 

 cart on manure, but to cart off the produce I 



605. After this, it appears unnecessary for me to 

 notice any other part of this Transalleganian romance, 

 which I might leave to the admiration of the Edinburgh 

 Reviewers, whose knowledge of these matters is quite 

 equal to what they have discovered as to the Funding 

 System and Paper Money. But when I think of the 

 flocks of poor English Farmers, who are tramping 

 away towards an imaginary, across a real land of milk 

 and honey, I cannot lay down the pen, till I have no- 

 ticed an item or two of the produce. 



606. The farmer is to have 100 acres of Indian 

 com, the first year. The minds of you gentlemen who 

 cross the Allegany seem to expand, as it were, to cor- 

 respond with the extent of the horizon that opens ia 

 your view ; but, I can assure you, that if you were to 

 talk to a farmer on this side of the mountains of a field 

 of Corn of a hundred acres during the first year of a 

 settlement, with grassy land and hands scarce, yoU 

 would frighten him into a third-day ague. In goes 

 your Com, however ! " Twenty more : kill 'em !" 

 Nothing but ploughing : no harrowing ; no marking ; 

 and only a horse-hoeing, during the summer, at a dollar 

 an acre. The planting is to cost only a quarter of a 

 dollar an acre. The planting Mill cost a dollar an acre. 

 The horse-hoeing in your grassy land, two dollars. 

 The hand-hoeing, which must be well done, or you will 

 have no corn, two dollars; for, in spite of your teeth, 

 your rampant natural grass will be up before your corn, 

 and a man must go to a thousand hills to do half an acre 

 a day. It will cost two dollars to harvest a hundred 

 bushels of com ears. So that here are about 400 dol- 



