126 TRAVELS THROUGH NORTH AMERICA: 
on the contrary, is of a roving disposition, and 
wholly regardless of the ties of consanguinity; 
he takes his wife with him, goes to a distant 
part of the country, and buries himself in the 
woods, hundreds of miles distant from the rest 
of his family, never perhaps to see them again* 
In the back parts of the country, you always 
meet numbers of men prowling about to try 
and buy cheap land ; having found what they 
like, they immediately remove: nor having 
once removed, are these people satisfied; rest¬ 
less and discontented with what they possess, 
they are for ever changing. It is scarcely pos¬ 
sible in any part of the continent to find a 
man, amongst the middling and lower classes 
of Americans, who has not changed his farm 
and his residence many different times. Thus 
it is, that though there are not more than 
four millions of people in the United States, 
yet they are scattered from the confines of 
Canada to the farthest extremity of Georgia, 
and from the Atlantic to the banks of the 
Mississippi. Thousands of acres of waste land 
are annually taken up in unhealthy and un¬ 
fruitful parts of the country, notwithstanding 
that the best settled and healthy parts of the 
middle states would maintain five times the 
number of inhabitants *hat they do at present.. 
The American, however, does not change 
about from place to place in this manner merely 
