Ixxxii LIFE OF WILSON. 



me to put down his name as a subscriber; and, after inquiring 

 particularly for Mr. P. and Mr. B., wished to be remembered 

 to both. 



"My journey through almost the whole of New England 

 has rather lowered the Yankees in my esteem. Except a few 

 neat academies, I found their schoolhouses equally ruinous and 

 deserted with ours fields covered with stones stone fences- 

 scrubby oaks and pine trees wretched orchards scarcely one 

 grain field in twenty miles the taverns along the road dirty, 

 and filled with loungers, brawling about law suits and politics 

 the people snappish, and extortioners, lazy, and two hundred 

 years behind the Pennsylvanians in agricultural improvements. 

 I traversed the country bordering the river Connecticut for 

 nearly two hundred miles. Mountains rose on either side, some- 

 times three, six, or eight miles apart, the space between almost 

 altogether alluvial; the plains fertile, but not half cultivated. 

 From some projecting headlands I had immense prospects of 

 the surrounding countries, every where clothed in pine, hem- 

 lock, and scrubby oak. 



"It was late in the evening when I entered Boston, and, 

 whirling through the narrow, lighted streets, or rather lanes, I 

 could form but a very imperfect idea of the town. Early the 

 next morning, resolved to see where I was, I sought out the 

 way to Beacon Hill, the highest part of the town, and whence 

 you look down on the roofs of the houses the bay interspersed 

 with islands the ocean the surrounding country, and distant 

 mountains of New Hampshire; but the most singular objects 

 are the long wooden bridges, of which there are five or six, 

 some of them three quarters of a mile long, uniting the towns 

 of Boston and Charlestown with each other, and with the main 

 land. I looked round with an eager eye for that eminence so 

 justly celebrated in the history of the revolution of the United 

 States, BUNKER'S HILL, but I could see nothing that I could 

 think deserving of the name, till a gentleman, who stood by, 

 pointed out a white monument upon a height beyond Charles- 

 town, which he said was the place. I explored my way thither 



