Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/132

This page needs to be proofread.

Stranger in America, it is here said, came and returned a stranger.[19] Parkinson, too, the experienced farmer and brewer of Doncaster, returned and said, the land would not grow grass.[20] This is not so great a misrepresentation as it at first sight appears. In many parts of Maryland and Virginia, the grass seems indeed dead, and all that survives is artificial grass.

28th.—When Mr. T. C. Wright first came to Georgetown, 17 years since, the forest approached his door, but now it has receded a mile and a half. The situation and prospect of things some years ago justified the statements now called Puffs.

Certain approaches to something like equality, and consequent familiarity of the rich with the poor, both of which classes profess to be no respecters {117} of persons, generate a manner highly repelling to the aristocratical feelings of the well-bred English. Dr. Dawes was waited on to-day by an American proprietor of land, offering his farm at six dollars an acre; the Doctor asked what had been its greatest produce per acre? At one time 15 bushels of wheat, but now only eight bushels. He said he had lost money by farming, through not pursuing a