LIFE OF WILSON. c iii 



spects to all the literati of that place without success. Five 

 miles north of this town lives a very extraordinary character, 

 between eighty and ninety years of age, who has lived by 

 trapping birds and quadrupeds these thirty years. Dr. F. car- 

 ried me out in a sleigh to see him, and presented me with a 

 tolerably good full length figure of him; he has also promised 

 to transmit to me such a collection of facts relative to this sin- 

 gular original, as will enable me to draw up an interesting nar- 

 rative of him for the Port Folio. I carried him half a pound 

 of snuff, of which he is insatiably fond, taking it by handfuls. 

 I was much diverted with the astonishment he expressed on 

 looking at the plates of my work he could tell me anecdotes 

 of the greater part of the subjects of the first volume, and some 

 of the second. One of his traps, which he says he invented 

 himself, is remarkable for ingenuity, and extremely simple. 

 Having a letter from Dr. Muhlenberg to a clergyman in Hano- 

 ver, I passed on through a well cultivated country, chiefly in- 

 habited by Germans, to that place, where a certain Judge took 

 upon himself to say, that such a book as mine ought not to be 

 encouraged, as it was not ivithin the reach of the commona- 

 lity; and therefore inconsistent with our republican institu- 

 tions! By the same mode of reasoning, which I did not dis- 

 pute, I undertook to prove him a greater culprit than myself, 

 in erecting a large, elegant, three-story brick house, so much 

 beyond the reach of the commonality, as he called them, and 

 consequently grossly contrary to our republican institutions. I 

 harangued this Solomon of the Bench more seriously after- 

 wards, pointing out to him the great influence of science on a 

 young rising nation like ours, and particularly the science of 

 Natural History, till he began to show such symptoms of in- 

 tellect, as to seem ashamed of what he had said. 



" From Hanover I passed through a thinly inhabited coun- 

 try; and crossing the North Mountain, at a pass called New- 

 man's Gap, arrived at Chambersburg, whence I next morning 

 returned to Carlisle, to visit the reverend doctors of the col- 

 lege. * * * 



