The Locust. 



years. The points of rafters, and the pins ^vhich hokl 

 rafters together, are always rotting. If these things were 

 made of Locust, your house would be safe for ages. Every 

 where, when you want something to lie sopping in the wet, 

 and at the same time to be exposed to the air, you should 

 have Locust. Endless are the uses to which it might be 

 put. A bottle-rack, for instance, that you want to stand out 

 of doors and hidden in some corner, a grindstone-stand, a 

 horse-block ; but, particularly, a cart-house, or anything 

 that requires pillars, the bottoms of which are to go into tJie 

 ground. Go into any farm-yard in England ; I do not care 

 what farm-yard it is : and you shall find, in the cart-house, 

 one of these things : first, the posts that support the build- 

 ings rotting off very fast, just where they meet the ground^ 

 second, those posts rotted off and cut off, and some stones 

 put under them, to the manifest risk of the cart-house; 

 third, the cart-house actually tumbling down in consequence 

 of the rotting off of the posts. This is notorious; every 

 farmer, every landlord in the kingdom, knows it. Now, I 

 * will insert a note from my memorandum-book, under date 

 of October 16, 1819. " At Judge Lawrence's, at Bayside, 

 I saw a new cider-house, built against a hill, the upper 

 " story of it supported in front by some Locust posts. These 

 *^ posts, the Judge told me, had stood for forty years, or 

 " rather better, as the posts of a cart-shed," They were as 

 sound as they had been the first year they were cut down. 

 In our stables in England, you see stones put at the bottom 

 of the stall-posts. What a plague it is ! Little Locust trees, 

 only about seven years old, would, for these purposes, make 

 posts that would last for ever. Every one knows how the 

 sleeper (as I think they call it) rots; that is to say, the piece 

 of wood that goes along at the bottom of each side of the 

 stall. We know, also, how the manger-posts rot off at 



