340 Letter ii. to [Part III; 



I have often talked of it in England as a good traffic. 

 We here sweep stables and streets with what the 

 English sweep their carpets with ! You can buy as 

 good a broom at New York for eightpence sterling as 

 you can buy in London for five shillings sterling^ and 

 the freight cannot exceed twopence or threepence, if 

 sent without handles. I bought a clothes-brush, an 

 English clothes-brush, the other day for three shillings 

 sterling. It was made of a farthing's tvorth of alder 

 wood and of half a farthing's worth of Broom-Corn. 

 An excellent brush. Better than bristles. I have 

 Broom-Corn and Seed-Stems enough to make fifty 

 thousand such brushes. I really think I shall send it 

 to England. It is now lying about my barn, and the 

 chickens are living upon the seeds. This plant demands 

 greater heat even than the Indian Corn. It would 

 hardly ripen its seed in England Indeed it would not. 

 But, if well managed, it would produce a prodigious 

 crop of materials lor reed-hedges and thatch. It is of 

 a substance (I mean the main stalk) between that of a 

 cane and that of a reed. It has joints precisely like 

 those of the canes, which you may have seen the Bo- 

 roughmonger's sons and footmen strut about with, called 

 bamboos. The seed-stalks, which make the brooms and 

 brushes, might not get so mature in England as to be so 

 good as they are here for those uses : but, I have no • 

 doubt, that, in any of the warm lands in Surrey, or 

 Kent, or Hampshire, a man might raise upon an acre 

 a crop worth several hundred pounds. The very stout 

 stalks, if properly harvested and applied, would last 

 nearly as long as the best hurdle rods. What beautiful 

 screens they would make in gardens and pleasure 

 grounds ! Ten feet long, and straight as a gun stick ! 

 i shall send some of the seed to England this year, and 

 cause a trial to be made ; and I will, in my Gardening 

 Book, give full instructions for the cultivation. Of this 

 book, which will be published soon, I would, if you 

 lived in this world, send you a copy. These are the 

 best uses of maritime intercourse : the interchange of 

 plants, animals, and improvements of all sorts. I am 

 doing my best to repay this country for the protection 



