barbarous is their management; yet none of the land is so poor as not to bear almost spontaneously, plenty of peaches, cherries, apples, and plums, wherever men or birds plant them."
21st.—In the navy-yard of this city is now living a free black man, who, together with his wife and a large family, all free, were stolen away from {130} their own house in the dead of the night, and sold into the distant state of Georgia. He alone managed to escape, but the rest have never since been seen or heard of. Such outrages on humanity and Christianity provoke no investigation, for Mammon, the supreme deity, must not be affronted. It is difficult to believe that a whole family of free-born people, living in the core of a free nation, the freest of the free, could thus fare in the nineteenth century.
By the papers to-day, I learn that travellers to the west were, last week, publicly assaulted and plundered by hordes of labourers at work on the great western road,[28] who stopped the United States' mail, demanding dollars and guineas from all the travellers, and lifting up their axes to strike all those who refused to deliver up their cash. There is no redress, because on seeking justice, the parties complaining must be bound over to prosecute. But this is inconvenient, and summary justice cannot be had; and therefore the thief escapes with complete impunity.
The natural soil is never to be made so fruitful as in England, for except in river bottoms, (land, in the valleys of rivers,) it is water-proof, and incapable of saturation. The rain never soaks in, but runs off as from a duck's back. Dig a spit or two deep, and it is dry and dusty within a few inches of the surface. This dryness contributes to
