“Indeed!  What are such immense tracts good for now-a-days?”

“Good for grass.”

“But they seem to pay little attention to grass.”

“True.  It is a splendid cheese country, as I have proved, but our people are not up to that as yet.”

“They will grow tobacco.  I saw some fine timber sacrificed for the sake of new-ground tobacco.”

“And why not?  A man gets tired of paying taxes for twenty or thirty years on timber which yields him nothing.”

I smiled an invisible smile, reverting in my thoughts to an assault I had made the week before upon my kinsman in Buckingham.  “William,” said I, “why will you Southside people continue to exhaust your land with tobacco?”

“Dick,” he replied, “you are the doggonedest fool out of jail. You, raised in Virginia, and ask a question like that!  Wheat is uncertain, corn doesn’t pay, we are too far from market for vegetables, too poor to put our lands in grass, and tobacco is the only thing that will fetch money.  As for exhausting land, plenty of tobacco is raised in Ohio and Connecticut, and you never hear anybody talk about exhausting land there.”

“Yes, but there they manure heavily, giving back to the land as much as they take, or more.”

“Well, old-field pine is good enough manure for a man who has plenty of land and can take his time.”

Thus in two instances my anti-tobacco wisdom turned out to be about as profitable as King James’s memorable Counterblast against the beloved weed of Virginia.

“But, general,” said I, “surely your neighbors don’t want to retain such vast tracts of land.”

“Certainly not.  Men do not like to part with good land, and if my friends could set their farms well in grass, so that a few hands could attend to them, they would only sell at very high figures; but being unable to do this, they are willing, and many of them anxious, to sell on most reasonable terms.”

“What is the trouble, then?”

“The trouble is about houses.”

“Explain.”

“Wealthy people seldom emigrate.  The men who leave home have generally but limited means, and coming here they find just the soil and climate they desire, but no place to lay their heads; and few if any of them can afford to buy land and build houses at the same time.  This, I am satisfied, is the main difficulty in the way of the speedy filling up of Virginia with the best class of yeoman settlers.”

“A difficulty not easily remedied.”

“No, for our people, rich in land, are even poorer in money than the immigrants themselves.”

“How on earth, then, did you manage to sell to the New Hampshire gentleman who came with me this evening, and who, as I learn, bought a part of your farm?”

“Why, I had a roomy house, and I just opened my doors to him and his family, and kept them here free of charge till their own house was finished.”