Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/307

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at four dollars, and sell it at sixteen dollars; and sugar, from New Orleans, would pay fifty per cent.; costing ten cents, and selling at twenty-five cents: two and a half cents being deducted per lb. for carriage. The store goods, bought at Washington, which he is selling cheaper than his neighbours, pay twenty-five per cent. profit. He has 640 acres of land entered, for which the first instalment is paid, and the next is to be paid in twelve months hence. He has entered, for G. Sutton, 328 acres.

After a sound dressing of aqua-fortis and grease, and scrubbing and washing in strong hot lie, I prepared for quitting Indiana, to-morrow, and wrote the following epistle to T. Drakard, Esq. in Old England.


{328} Once for all, from an inquiring Englishman in the United States.

To the Editor of the Stamford News.


Ingle's Refuge, Banks of Ohio, State of Indiana, 25th December, 1819.

Sir,

To my esteemed friends and countrymen, living within the wide circuit of your paper, and expecting many long promised epistles, say that the task is impracticable, and therefore justly abandoned. What they need, truth, is always difficult to attain; and a correct impression of things, made by weight of unwilling, or long concealed evidence, examined and cross-examined, will, perhaps, be found in my journal, calculated to undeceive, disappoint, and, as usual, offend, nearly all those of whom, and for whom I have written.

It is, I regret to say, too true, that the writings of emigrants, however respectable, present a partial or unfaithful portraiture; "shewing things as they should be, not as they