The LfOcUsT. 



341. The fact, theii^ of the durability of this v/ood, is here 

 put beyond dispute. If it lasts sound as a post out of doors 

 for more than a hundred years, it may be fairly said to last 

 for ever. If it will make axletrees for a wagon, after hav- 

 ing lain as a barn sill in the wet and dirt for forty years, it 

 may be fairly said that it will yield to nothing but fire. 

 This tree has no sap. It is all of the same quality, and 

 Judge Lawrence showed me some with the bark on per- 

 fectly sound, after having stood more than twenty years. It 

 is all spine. It is just as hard when as big round as your 

 wrist, as when it is as big round as your body. Here are 

 hop-poles, then ! Here is stuff to make hurdle gates for 

 sheep-folding ! Here is stulF for clothes-posts and all sorts 

 of uses. A Locust hop-pole, when once pointed, would 

 serve, and that, too, without any more pointing, for half a 

 centuri/. At Fleet-street there is one of the stakes which I 

 mentioned above, and which I brought from the farm of 

 Judge Mitchell. Whoever looks at this stake will see 

 that it was a mere branch, and a crooked and poor branch, 

 too, cut off from a tree ; yet it lasted as a stake for thirty 

 years, and is now as hard and as solid as it was on the day 

 that it was cut off the tree. 



342. Will any one suppose, that the names that I have 

 made use of here, are not real names ? Amongst the 

 wretched calumniators of the day, there may be some to 

 pretend to believe this; but no one will believe it. I wish, 

 however, to leave no doubt with regard to a matter, which, 

 as the reader will clearly see, I have long had my heart set 

 upon. I will therefore state, that Mr. Singleton Mitchell 

 is a brother of the really celebrated Doctor Mitchell, of 

 New York, who has written so ably on natural history, who 

 is famed for his learning, who is a member of most of the 

 learned Societies of Europe, and who is not less renowned 



