being determined that neither himself nor family shall barbarize. This is impossible: all barbarize here. He has bought six quarter sections, and hopes not to do more than keep his property, get land for his family, and live and die comfortably. Riches he thinks out of the question and it is his wish that the settlement should feel and act towards each other as one family; the reverse of Illinois, in which he intended to settle, and to which he was attracted by the books of Mr. Birkbeck, who refused him land, except at an advanced price, although he had {247} 30,000 acres retained for people in England, who never came; while those who applied, many and respectable practical farmers, were denied.
The settlers here being all out of wheat-flour and Indian corn-meal, Mr. Ingle, self, a boy, and two children began, at noon, to gather and shell ears of corn for grinding into meal, and finished two bushels by night, ready for the mill, ten miles off, next day; when a boy on a horse started with it early, expecting to return on the following Sunday morning, if not lost in the woods.
12th.—Visited Mr. Potts's cabin and farm, 400 acres of good land, on which he lives, without a woman, but has a good man from Stockport in Cheshire, where they both came from, and thus they alone manage both the house and the field. They have dug a well, many feet through the solid rock, without finding water. I saw here an experiment which I little expected to see; the eighth of an acre of upland rice; three quarts were sown on it in May, in drills, eighteen inches asunder, and the increase is three bushels. The straw is like barley straw, and the stubble rank and stout, and not to be known from oat stubble, on rich fen land, only brighter.
Saw a poor Englishman, who some time since broke his
