ran a clear stream, whose bed had been deepened into a little reservoir, just opposite the house.  A noble field of Indian-corn stretched away into the forest on one side, and a few half-cleared acres, with a shed or two upon them, occupied the other, giving accommodation to cows, horses, pigs, and chickens innumerable.  Immediately before the house was a small potatoe garden, with a few peach and apple trees.  The house was built of logs, and consisted of two rooms, besides a little shanty or lean-to, that was used as a kitchen.  Both rooms were comfortably furnished with good beds, drawers, &c.  The farmer’s wife, and a young woman who looked like her sister, were spinning, and three little children were playing about.  The woman told me that they spun and wove all the cotton and woolen garments of the family, and knit all the stockings; her husband, though not a shoe-maker by trade, made all the shoes.  She manufactured all the soap and candles they used, and prepared her sugar from the sugar-trees on their farm.  All she wanted with money, she said, was to buy coffee, tea, and whiskey, and she could “get enough any day by sending a batch of butter and chicken to market.”  They used no wheat, nor sold any of their corn, which, though it appeared a very large quantity, was not more than they required to make their bread and cakes of various kinds, and to feed all their live stock during the winter.  She did not look in health, and said they had all had ague in “the fall;” but she seemed contented, and proud of her independence; though it was in somewhat a mournful accent that she said, “Tis strange to us to see company:  I expect the sun may rise and set a hundred times before I shall see another human that does not belong to the family.”

I have been minute in the description of this forest farm, as I think it the best specimen I saw of the back-wood’s independence, of which so much is said in America.  These people were indeed independent, Robinson Crusoe was hardly more so, and they eat and drink abundantly; but yet it seemed to me that there was something awful and almost unnatural in their loneliness.  No village bell ever summoned them to prayer, where they might meet the friendly greeting of their fellow-men.  When they die, no spot sacred by ancient reverence will receive their bones—­Religion will not breathe her sweet and solemn farewell upon their grave; the husband or the father will dig the pit that is to hold them, beneath the nearest tree; he will himself deposit them within it, and the wind that whispers through the boughs will be their only requiem.  But then they pay neither taxes nor tythes, are never expected to pull off a hat or to make a curtsy, and will live and die without hearing or uttering the dreadful words, “God save the king.”