' a stranger make his way through England-let him keep at a dis-. tance from every public road,' (made for his accommodation,)' avoid. all the inns,' (established expressly for his convenience and comfort,) and perversely scramble over hedge and ditch in quest of such en tertainment only as the hovel of the labourer can supply, and he would have more cause to complain of the rudeness of the inhabitants' than of the weir-wolves of the wilds of Indiana! If we could conceive a traveller to be guilty of such gratuitous folly, we should then say, that as his application to the day-labourer for 'entertainment' could only be looked upon as a deliberate insult on his poverty, he would deserve whatever rudeness he might chance to experience. In somewhat of a similar spirit, Mr. Birkbeck adds ——' when we have been so unfortunate as to pitch our tent near a swamp, and have mismanaged our fire, we have been teased by musquitoes; but so might we, perhaps, in the fens of Cambridgeshire.' The traveller must have a strong predilection for the teasing of musquitoes who would sleep in the fens of Cambridgeshire, when by turning a few yards to the right or left he might obtain shelter under a roof and this, too, without the hazard of being, like Mr. Birkbeck and his party, driven out again by the innumerable tormentors which (says he) assail you in every dwelling, till at length you are glad to avoid the abodes of man, and spread your pallet under the trees.' p. 167. Certainly these are pleasant proofs of the inferiority of England to America.

6

Mr. Birkbeck now visited the banks of the Ohio, to see if any thing offered to satisfy his views.

'We lodged last night in a cabin at a very new town, called Mount Vernon, on the banks of the Ohio. Here we found the people of a cast confirming my aversion to a settlement in the immediate vicinity of a large navigable river. Every hamlet is demoralized, and every plantation is liable to outrage, within a short distance of such a thoroughfare.

'Yet, the view of that noble expanse was like the opening of bright day upon the gloom of night, to us who had been so long buried in deep forests. It is a feeling of confinement, which begins to damp the spirits, from this complete exclusion of distant objects. To travel day after day, among trees of a hundred feet high, without a glimpse of the surrounding country, is oppressive to a degree which those cannot conceive who have not experienced it; and it must depress the spirits of the solitary settler to pass years in this state. His visible horizon extends no farther than the tops of the trees which bound his plantation, perhaps, five hundred yards. Upwards he sees the sun, and sky, and stars, but around him an eternal forest, from which he can never hope to emerge:-not so in a thickly settled district; he cannot there enjoy any freedom of prospect, yet there is variety, and some scope for the imprisoned vision. In a hilly country a little more range of view may occasionally be obtained; and a river is a stream of light as well as of

water,

water, which feasts the eye with a delight inconceivable to the inhabitants of open countries.'-pp. 102, 103.

He next tried the Big-Prairie beyond the Wabash, but it was marshy and feverish; thirty miles farther, prairies of a higher site were more promising; the people were healthy, but they were in a wretched state of civilization, about half Indian in their mode of life. Besides, they shew little cordiality towards a 'land-hunter,' as they contemptuously call the stranger in search of a home; they consider such a person as an invader of their privileges, which give them the whole range of the forests for themselves and their cattle. Beyond the little Wabash, every mark of civilization was lost; and it was necessary to engage a hunter as their guide. Having wandered some time without any beaten track, they came at length to the cabin of a brother-hunter, where they took up their lodging.

This man and his family are remarkable instances of the effect on the complexion, produced by the perpetual incarceration of a thorough woodland life. Incarceration may seem to be a term less applicable to the condition of a roving back-woodsman than to any other, and especially unsuitable to the habits of this individual and his family; for the cabin in which he entertained us is the third dwelling he has built within the last twelve months; and a very slender motive would place him in a fourth before the ensuing winter. In his general habits the hunter ranges as freely as the beasts he pursues; labouring under no restraint, his activity is only bounded by his own physical powers: still he is incarcerated-" Shut from the common air." Buried in the depth of a boundless forest, the breeze of health never reaches these poor wanderers; the bright prospect of distant hills fading away into the semblance of clouds, never cheered their sight. They are tall and pale, like vegetables that grow in a vault, pining for light.

The man, his pregnant wife, his eldest son, a tall half-naked youth, just initiated in the hunters' arts, his three daughters, growing up into great rude girls, and a squalling tribe of dirty brats of both sexes, are of one pale yellow, without the slightest tint of healthful bloom.'-p. 107. 'The cabin, which may serve as a specimen of these rudiments of houses, was formed of round logs, with apertures of three or four inches between. No chimney, but large intervals between the “clap-boards," for the escape of the smoke. The roof was, however, a more effectual covering than we have generally experienced, as it protected us very tolerably from a drenching night. Two bedsteads of unhewn logs, and cleft boards laid across;-two chairs, one of them without a bottom, and a low stool, were all the furniture required by this numerous family. A string of buffalo hide, stretched across the hovel, was a wardrobe for their rags; and their utensils, consisting of a large iron pot, some baskets, the effective rifle and two that were superannuated, stood about in corners, and the fiddle, which was only silent when we were asleep, hung by them.'-p. 109.

'Is this the region, this the soil, the clime!
Said then the lost Archangel'-

And is this then the state of happiness; is this the land of pro'mise,' for which such multitudes cross the Atlantic?—are these the blessings which are to greet the wearied traveller after a painful journey of many thousand miles into the back woods of the Americau paradise, thus sketched out by the flattering pencil of one who leaves his native country with an avowed predetermination to find every thing pleasant and agreeable in America? Such a life, however, is not without its enjoyments. Man returns here to that state of nature in which he is accountable to no earthly tribunal for his actions, which are as free and unrestrained as his thoughts; he may shoot a bear or an Indian without any other fear than the tomahawk of the one and the paw of the other. And experience has unfortunately proved that when once he has thrown off the restraints which a state of civilization and a sense of religion impose, he feels little inclination to reassume them: as population advances, the back-woodsmen retire; for 'strangers appear among them as invaders of their privileges, as they have intruded on the better founded exclusive privileges of their Indian predecessors.'

These men, it would seem, though persevering as savages in the pursuit of their game, are as indolent too. This indolence, Mr. Birkbeck says, they cultivate as a privilege,' and he repeats over and over again, that indolence is the easily besetting sin of the Americans. The supreme felicity of a true born American is described to be inaction of body and inanity of mind. If the picture be overcharged, it is not we, but our Friend Morris, who has painted it.

We have a sketch of a somewhat more pleasing nature in the dreary, flat, and swampy region between the Little and the Big Wabash, where, Mr. Birkbeck tells us, 'here and there, at ten miles distance perhaps, the very solitude tempts some one of the family of Esau to pitch his tent for a season.'

'At one of these lone dwellings we found a neat, respectable-looking female, spinning under the little piazza at one side of the cabin, which shaded her from the sun. Her husband was absent on business, which would detain him some weeks. She had no family, and no companion but her husband's faithful dog, which usually attended him in his bear hunting in the winter. She was quite overcome with "lone," she said, and hoped we would tie our horses in the wood, and sit awhile with her, during the heat of the day. We did so, and she rewarded us with a basin of coffee. Her husband was kind and good to her, and never left her without necessity, but a true lover of bear hunting, which he pursued alone, taking only his dog with him, though it is common for hunters to go in parties to attack this dangerous animal. He had killed

a great

a great number last winter-five, I think, in one week. The cabin of this hunter was neatly arranged, and the garden well stocked.'-pp.

112, 113.

And THIS is the chosen spot where Mr. Birkbeck has 'constituted himself a land-owner by paying seven hundred and twenty dollars as one-fourth of the purchase money of fourteen hundred and forty acres'? Mr. Flower made a similar purchase, 'being part of a beautiful and rich prairie, about six miles distant from the Big and the same from the Little Wabash.'

The rest of the book is very much in the nature of a puffing advertisement-inviting all persons wishing to obtain satisfactory information to direct their inquiries to Mr. Morris Birkbeck of Princeton, Gibson county, Indiana,-where gulls from England will find employment in clearing his wilderness. An English farmer,' he says, possessing three thousand pounds, besides the charges of removal, (no light matter,) may establish himself well, as a proprietor and occupier of six hundred and forty acres'-of swamp or jungle; the folly or the wisdom of the undertaking,' he adds, I leave among the propositions, which are too plain to admit of illustration.' We are much misinformed (we have it from Washington) if Mr. Birkbeck, and his friend Flower too, have not long since found the 'proposition' much plainer even than they expected, and that if they can only find two English farmers' to take their precious bargain off their hands, we shall, in no great length of time, see them both back again on the sheep downs of Sussex. The flattering prospect indulged by these two 'friends' of sitting under their own vines and their own fig-trees,' on the fifteen hundred acres each, which they had carved for themselves from a beautiful prairie,' has already faded, and the fatal truth has been realized, that this new paradise affords no comforts like England, and that even the penny-an-acre tax' is paying a halfpenny too much. In spite, as we have already observed, of his forced attempt to make the best of America, every now and then the truth peeps out in some sarcastic remark on the character or the condition of the people. Among other things he is not a little shocked to hear American lips call the grand in scenery disgusting'-the very scenery, by the way, which characterizes his purchase-while the epithet elegant' is used on every occasion to which it does not belong. We wonder it did not strike our fastidious friend that this was merely a species of the genus' anticipation.'

'An elegant improvement is a cabin of rude logs, and a few acres with the trees cut down to the height of three feet, and surrounded by a worm-fence, or ziz-zag railing. You hear of an elegant mill, an ele gant orchard, an elegant tan-yard, &c. and familiarly of elegant roads, -meaning such as you may pass without extreme peril. The word

implies eligibility or usefulness in America, but has nothing to do with. taste; which is a term as strange to the American language, where I have heard it spoken, as comfort is said to be to the French, and for a similar reason: the idea has not yet reached them.'-p. 152.

In the plan which Mr. Birkbeck has already drawn up for the regulation of his new settlement, (for in a paroxysm of vanity, the poor man aspires to be the William Penn of the country on the Wabash,) there is not one syllable mentioned of religious instruc-, tion, nor one farthing set apart for any kind of public worship,'mutual interest,' good neighbourhood,'' concentration of capital and population,' are particularly enforced, and repeatedly mentioned as essential to property; but morality and religion form no part of the system. Mr. Birkbeck, however, is not contented with the mere omission of providing some institution for the religious and moral conduct of his citizens or subjects-he openly avows his hostility to all religious communities. I wish,' says he, to see capital and population concentrated, with no bond of cohesion, but common interest arising out of vicinity, the true elements, as I conceive, of a prosperous nation.'-(p. 124.) And this is said in allusion to an industrious, inoffensive, and prosperous community, called Harmonites,' who have literally raised a town in the wilderness, near the banks of the Ohio; but he tells us 'a slavish acquiescence, under a disgusting superstition, is so remarkable an ingredient in their character, that it checks all desire of imitation.' But he shall himself describe Harmony.'

This day, being Sunday, afforded us an opportunity of seeing grouped and in their best attire, a large part of the members of this wonderful community. It was evening when we arrived, and we saw no human creature about the streets:—we had even to call the landlord of the inn out of church to take charge of our horses. The cows were waiting round the little dwellings to supply the inhabitants with their evening's meal. Soon the entire body of people, which is about seven hundred, poured out of the church, and exhibited so much health, and peace, and neatness in their persons, that we could not but exclaim, Surely the institutions which produce so much happiness must have more of good than of evil in them; and here I rest, not lowered in my abhorrence of the hypocrisy, if it be such, which governs the ignorant by nursing them in superstition; but inclined in charity to believe that the leaders are sincere. Certain it is, that living in such plenty, and a total abstraction from care about the future provision for a family, it must be some overbearing thraldom that prevents an increase of their numbers by the natural laws of population.'-pp. 119, 120.

Happy Harmonites!-let such scoffers as Mr. Birkbeck despise your ignorance and ridicule your 'superstition.' Above all, happy if you should escape the contamination of infidelity from such neighbours as those who affect to hold you up to scorn while they