528 LETTER W (PART in. 



and distress not easily described, and that too, 

 to live like gipsies at the end of their journey, 

 for, at }east, a year or two, and, as I think I 

 shall show, without the smallest chance of their 

 finally doing* so well as they may do in these 

 Atlantic States? Why should an English Farmer 

 and his family, who have always been jogging 

 about a snug home-stead, eating regular meals, 

 and sleeping in warm rooms, push back to the 

 Illinois, and encounter those hardships, which 

 require all the habitual disregard of comfort of 

 an American back-woods-man to overcome? 

 Why should they do this? The undertaking is 

 hardly reconeileable to reason in aa Atlantic 

 American Farmer who has half a dozen sons, 

 all brought up to use the axe, the saw, the 

 chisel and the hamrner from their infancy, and 

 every one of whom is ploughman, carpenter, 

 wheelwright and butcher, and can work from 

 sun-rise to sun-set, and sleep, if need be, upon 

 the bare boards. What, then, must it be in an 

 English Farmer and his family of helpless, mor 

 tals? Helpless, I mean, in this scene of such 

 novelty and such difficulty? And what is his 

 wife to do ; she who has been torn from all her 

 Telations and neighbours, and from every thing 

 that she liked in the world, and who, perhaps, 

 has never, in all her life before, been ten miles 

 from the cradle in which she was nursed? An 



