By “paraira” you must understand prairie.  “It is a most splendid song,” continued the singer.  “It touches off one state after another.  Connecticut, for example:” 

  “Connecticut has blue laws,
    And when the beer, on Sunday,
  Gets working in the barrel,
    They flog it well on Monday.”

At Benson, in Vermont, we emerged upon a smoother country, a country of rich pastures, fields heavy with grass almost ready for the scythe, and thick-leaved groves of the sugar-maple and the birch.  Benson is a small, but rather neat little village, with three white churches, all of which appear to be newly built.  The surrounding country is chiefly fitted for the grazing of flocks, whose fleeces, however, just at present, hardly pay for the shearing.

Letter XVII.

An Excursion to Vermont and New Hampshire.

Keene, New Hampshire, July 13, 1843.

I resume my journey where I stopped short in my last, namely, on reaching Benson, in Vermont, among the highlands west of Lake Champlain.  We went on through a pastoral country of the freshest verdure, where we saw large flocks of sheep grazing.  From time to time we had glimpses of the summits of a long blue ridge of mountains to the east of us, and now and then the more varied and airy peaks of the mountains which lie to the west of the lake.  They told me that of late years this part of the country had suffered much from the grasshoppers, and that last summer, in particular, these insects had made their appearance in immense armies, devouring the plants of the ground and leaving it bare of herbage.  “They passed across the country,” said one person to me, “like hail storms, ravaging it in broad stripes, with intervals between in which they were less numerous.”

At present, however, whether it was the long and severe winter which did not fairly end till the close of April, or whether it was the uncommonly showery weather of the season hitherto, that destroyed these insects, in some early stage of their existence, I was told that there is now scarce a grasshopper in all these meadows and pastures.  Everywhere the herbage was uncommonly luxuriant, and everywhere I saw the turf thickly sprinkled with the blossoms of the white clover, on the hill, in the valley, among rocks, by streams, by the road-side, and whenever the thinner shade of the woods allowed the plants of the field to take root.  We might say of the white clover, with even more truth than Montgomery says of the daisy:—­

  “But this bold floweret climbs the hill,
    Hides in the forest, haunts the glen,
  Plays on the margin of the rill,
    Peeps o’er the fox’s den.”