Oct. 16th.—­I believe the Americans conceive their woods to be inexhaustible.  My landlord this day cut down thirty-two young cedars to make a hog-pen.  A settler informs me, he raised a gum tree from the seed, which, in sixteen years, measured twenty inches diameter, three feet from it’s base.  He tells, me they have ten species of oak; viz, white, black, red, spanish, turkey, chesnut, ground, water, barren, and live oak.  The white, turkey, and chesnut are used for ship-timber; the acorn of the latter very superiour in size to any other.  Red oak is chiefly used for pipe-staves, and exported to most parts of Europe, and the West Indies.  Black oak is a dry wood, and easily splits; is chiefly used for the rails and fences of their enclosures.  Ground oak is bushy, and seldom exceeds six feet in height; it bears a small acorn of a very superiour flavour, which is the chief food of the deer, and sheep, who run wild in the woods.  Water and barren oak are small and bushy, and only used for firing.  Live oak is said to be very superiour to all the rest, and the best ship-timber in the world.  I am informed it is a sort of evergreen, seldom met with north of the Carolinas.

Oct. 26th.—­Went to Philadelphia.—­After crossing the Delaware, I found the land very different from the Jersey shore; a fine stiff black soil, the clover growing spontaneously.  The city exhibited a most melancholy spectacle; most of the houses and stores shut up, and grass growing in many of the streets; what few white inhabitants I met with had a most dejected appearance.  The disorder has been most favourable to the softer sex; women with child, and those above and under a certain age, were in general free from the infection:  but so fatal has it proved to the other sex, that, in Apple-tree-alley, which does not exceed fifty yards in length, there are upwards of sixty widows within these two months.  The total loss on this melancholy occasion already exceeds four thousand, nearly one tenth of the inhabitants!  Returning to Woodbury, I met with a quaker, who informed me of the cause of the infectious disorder in the Great City:  “It is a judgment on the inhabitants for their sins, insomuch that they sent to England for a number of play-actors, singers, and musicians, who were actually arrived; and as a just judgment on the Philadelphians for encouraging these children of iniquity, they were now afflicted with the yellow fever.”  I told him, that more likely the sins of the quakers had drawn down this judgment on the city of brotherly love, and that it was now scourged for their hypocrisy, lying, canting, and other manifold iniquities.

Oct. 27th.—­Very cold wind at N.W.  In the evening snow.

Oct. 29th.—­Favourable accounts from Philadelphia:  the late cold weather has entirely stopped the progress of the disorder.

November 26th.