beef, five cents; mutton, six cents, per pound; and game, fine prairie-hens, like grouse and turkeys, in sickening abundance.
{273} J. Ingle and family, eight in number, out of business, lived for four dollars a week at Princeton!
Mr. Flower would not live on woodland as a gift, if prairie land could be bought. The latter certainly seems most adapted for an English farmer; yet it costs as much to fence, and bring it into cultivation as woodland; for though less manual, yet more horse labour is necessary than in the woods. Six horses are necessary for the first ploughing, as the grass and shrub roots are deep down and uncommonly tough, having been growing for ages. It is, therefore, worth five dollars an acre to effect the first ploughing, and three or four dollars, the second. A summer's fallow is, besides, necessary for rotting the roots, and properly pulverizing the soil; and, unless so managed, it is badly managed. Both Flower and Birkbeck sowed nothing the first year, which came to any use. The latter planted corn, which the cattle destroyed, through want of a good fence, which must be hauled from the woodland, a considerable distance, to the prairie; the inclosing is, therefore, more expensive than on the woodland.
23rd.—Spending this day with Mr. G. Flower, I rode from ten till five o'clock round the prairie, in which is their fine park-like domain, and some smaller estates, purchased for their friends in England, of which there is one with a house and some improvements belonging to Wed Nash, Esq., of Royston, Herts., and more rich and beautiful than {274} any he can see from the bleak, barren, chalky hills of his native town. I called at an adjoining farm, rented by a dirty, naked-legged French family, who, though born in this country, know nothing of the English
