Ixxxviii 
LIFE OF WILSON. 
top of a miserable barren mountain, several miles from a house. 
It is in vain to reason with the people on the impropriety of this — 
custom makes every absurdity proper. There is scarcely any cur- 
rency in this country but paper, and I solemnly declare that I do not 
recollect having seen one hard dollar since I left Newyork. Bills 
even of twenty-five cents, of a hundred different banks, whose very 
names one has never heard of before, are continually in circulation. 
I say nothing of the jargon which prevails in the country. Their 
boasted schools, if I may judge by the state of their schoolhouses, 
are no better than our own. 
“ Lawyers swarm in every town like locusts ; almost every 
door has the word Office painted over it, which, like the web of a 
spider, points out the place where the spoiler lurks for his prey. 
There is little or no improvement in agriculture ; in fifty miles I 
did not observe a single grain or stubble field, though the country 
has been cleared and settled these one hundred and fifty years. In 
short, the steady habits of a great portion of the inhabitants of those 
parts of Newengland through which I passed, seem to be laziness, 
law bickerings and * * * A man here is as much ashamed of 
being seen walking the streets on Sunday, unless in going and re- 
turning from church, as many would be of being seen going to 
a ^ ^ ^ ^ house. 
As you approach Boston the country improves in its appear- 
ance ; the stone fences give place to those of posts and rails ; the 
road becomes wide and spacious ; and every thing announces a 
better degree of refinement and civilization. It was dark when I 
entered Boston, of which I shall give you some account in my next. 
I have visited the celebrated Bunker’s Hill, and no devout pilgrim 
ever approached the sacred tomb of his holy Prophet with more 
awful enthusiasm, and profound veneration, than I felt in tracing 
the grass-grown intrenchments of this hallowed spot, made immor- 
tal by the bravery of those hex’oes who defended it, whose ashes are 
now mingled with its soil, and of whom a mean, beggarly pillar 
of bricks is all the memento.” 
