which claims our warmest acknowledgments.  I spend my time here very agreeably.  The politeness, ease, and conviviality of the Annapolians form a strong and pleasing contrast to the behaviour of the stiff, gloomy and unsocial bigots I was lately surrounded with in the Jerseys.  Next to Virginia, this state was the most famous for tobacco-plantations; but the people now find the culture of wheat more profitable, as well as less injurious to the soil.  No plant impoverishes the earth so much by it’s growth as tobacco; many plantations, owing to successive crops of this weed, are what is here called worn out; formerly, when their land was in this state, instead of endeavouring to bring it round by a few fallow years and manure, as in England, they immediately cleared a fresh tract.  They now begin to use manure, and have discovered a very extraordinary kind; viz. antediluvian oyster-shells, large beds of which are found a few feet beneath the surface of the earth in several parts of the state[Footnote:  See Bartram’s Account of a similar Bed in Georgia, page 213.]:  these being laid on the land, are, by the effect of the air, crumbled into dust in a few days, and fertilize the earth in an astonishing degree.—­Farewell.—­Conclude me

Yours very sincerely, &c.

Philadelphia, 27th February, 1794.

DEAR FRIEND,

On the fourth instant I left Annapolis on my way to this city.  After travelling eight miles, we passed through a long and dreary wood; here we met two negroes conveying a coffin on a sort of sledge.  On inquiry, one of them informed us, the coffin contained the corpse of his mother; that on the death of his old master, his parents were sold to different planters, which his father took so much to heart, that he died soon after; his mother only survived him about five months; and they were now complying with her last request, which was, to be carried to a plantation about eight miles thence, and there buried with her husband.  There seemed a great degree of dejection in the poor fellow’s countenance; and I could not help telling him, by way of consolation, that his father and mother were gone to a better place, where there was no distinction of colour, and where no white man would dare again to part them; but as words are wind, we agreed to administer some more solid consolation, which the black man received with a look of gratitude, then cast his eye towards his mother’s corpse, and shed a silent tear.  Why was not Sterne present at this scene?

I slept at an inn, about twenty miles from Annapolis, where we supped in the American fashion on fried squirrels and coffee, the former excellent.