136 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



logue of diseases which your physicians try to cure (and cannot, 

 but which the patient pays well for), they may come with the 

 expectation of casting off the burthen, which they do not wish to 

 carry. If tens of thousands of the citizens of your great city 

 were here, instead of there, they might be much better off than 

 where they are now. If the poor man, who is able to labor, would 

 come here, and go to work with his muscle and brain, he might 

 rapidly work his way up to, at least, competence. If the man of 

 small means would come here and invest them wisely, and be 

 industrious and economical, he might greatly improve his condi- 

 tion. If the rich man who loves to go any summer into the wil- 

 derness of Northern New York, where he is almost devoured with 

 musketoes and gnats, to hunt the deer, would come, he would 

 find this much better ground for sport, for he would find ten deer 

 here to one there, with the additional comfort of thousands of 

 fruit in the fields and orchards, and health in every breath of 

 atmosphere. It is said that potatoes do not succeed well at the 

 South. They do here, at the rate of five hundred bushels per acre. 

 The soil is sandy loam; climate salubrious; elevation about three 

 thousand feet above tide- water. Sweet potatoes also flourish, and 

 wherever grass and clover have been tried the result is satisfactorj'." 



Manufacture of CoTTOisr Cloth in Texas. 



J. R. S. Vanvleet. — I have just returned from Texas. I find 

 some situations there very desirable for improvement. At New 

 Braunfels, a Mr. Torrey, from New England, has built a cotton 

 mill, upon a very excellent water power, formed by immense 

 springs that burst out from the foot of a hill at the distance of a 

 quarter of a mile, giving a fall of thirty or forty feet in a mile 

 and a half, and a good sized stream never affected by drouth. Mr. 

 Torrey is manufacturing brown sheetings about twenty per cent 

 cheaper than they can be in Massachusetts, owing to saving of 

 transportation of cotton and cheaper provisions. He pays girls 

 fifty cents a day and gets plenty of help. This part of Texas is 

 mostly settled with a first-rate class of industrious Germans, and 

 it is an excellent region for wool growing. 



Mr. John Slosser, Tiffin, Seneca Co., Ohio, says : " The trench 

 of a foundation concrete wall should be dug two feet wider than 

 the wall is thick, or it will not dry. Concrete will not do in wet 

 cellars, nor in trenches that freeze before the concrete is entirely 

 dry." 



