branches, or its trunk slide off or rebound in an unforeseen manner, scattering fragments and throwing limbs upon the choppers below.  Accidents often, deaths sometimes, occurred.  A skilful woodman, by a glance at the surrounding trees and their branches, could tell where the tree on which he was about to operate should fall, and bring it unerringly to the ground in the right direction.  There was, moreover, danger from lurking savages; and, if the chopper was alone in the deep woods, from the prowling solitary bear, or hungry wolves, which, going in packs, were sometimes formidable.  There were elements also, in the work, that awakened the finer sentiments.  The lonely and solemn woods are God’s first temples.  They are full of mystic influences; they nourish the poetic nature; they feed the imagination.  The air is elastic, and every sound reverberates in broken, strange, and inexplicable intonations.  The woods are impregnated with a health-giving and delightful fragrance nowhere else experienced.  All the arts of modern luxury fail to produce an aroma like that which pervades a primitive forest of pines and spruces.  Indeed, all trees, in an original wilderness, where they exist in every stage of growth and decay, contribute to this peculiar charm of the woods.  It was not only a manly, but a most lively, occupation.  When many were working near each other, the echoes of their voices of cheer, of the sharp and ringing tones of their axes, and of the heavy concussions of the falling timber, produced a music that filled the old forests with life, and made labor joyous and refreshing.

The length of time required to prepare a country covered by a wilderness, on a New-England soil, for cultivation, may be estimated by the facts I have stated.  A long lapse of years must intervene, after the woods have been felled and their dried trunks and branches burned, before the stumps can be extracted, the land levelled, the stones removed, the plough introduced, or the smooth green fields, which give such beauty to agricultural scenes, be presented.  An immense amount of the most exhausting labor must be expended in the process.  The world looks with wonder on the dykes of Holland, the wall of China, the pyramids of Egypt.  I do not hesitate to say that the results produced by the small, scattered population of the American colonies, during their first century, in tearing up a wilderness by its roots, transforming the rocks, with which the surface was covered, into walls, opening roads, building bridges, and making a rough and broken country smooth and level, converting a sterile waste into fertile fields blossoming with verdure and grains and fruitage, is a more wonderful monument of human industry and perseverance than them all.  It was a work, not of mere hired laborers, still less of servile minions, but of freemen owning, or winning by their voluntary and cheerful toil, the acres on which they labored, and thus entitling themselves to be the sovereigns of the country they were creating.  A few thousands of such men, with such incentives, wrought wonders greater than millions of slaves or serfs ever have accomplished, or ever will.