half a dollar a day for three meals and lodging; and there are boarding-houses on the terms of only a hundred dollars a year for board, lodging, and washing. The great towns on the Atlantic are vastly dearer; in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charlestown, the average price of decent accommodation being ten dollars a week. Those places however have the advantage in respect to foreign manufactures, wine, and liquor: for their Madeira is a dollar a bottle, but here it is a dollar and a half; and spirits of course are in the same rates. This is the natural effect of the dangerous, difficult, and expensive, land-carriage. As these latter are articles of luxury, their weight falls alone on the affluent: the other classes of society have excellent porter brewed in the town at a very cheap rate, and whiskey is to be had for two shillings a gallon.

The price of land varies with the quality, the distance from the town,

and other causes. Farms on the margins of navigable waters are 300 per cent. dearer than those lying behind them. Good land on the banks of a river, and near a market-town, is not to be had under ten dollars an acre; · but land under contrary circumstances brings only from one to two or five dollars. Such land yields from twenty to thirty bushels of wheat, and from forty to sixty bushels of Indian corn.

In

As for the amusements here, they are under the dominion of the seasons. winter, carioling or sleying predominates: the snow no sooner falls, than pleasure, bustle, and confusion, banish business, speculation, and strife; nothing is seen but mirth, and nothing is heard but harmony. All All young men of a certain condition provide themselves with handsome carioles and good horses, and take out their favourite female friends, whom with much dexterity they drive through

53

the streets; calling on every acquaintance, and taking refreshment at many For the night, an an open house. appointment is generally made by a large party (for instance, the company of twenty or thirty carioles) to meet at a tavern several miles distant; to which they go by torch-light, and accompanied by music. On arriving there, the ladies cast off their fur pelisses, assume all their beauties, and with the men commence This is followed by

dance.

the mazy supper, songs, catches, and glees. When the voice of Prudence dispels the charm, they resume their vehicles, and return delighted with the moments which they have thus passed:-this is repeated freThe summer quently during the snow. amusements consist principally of concerts, evening walks, and rural festivals held in the vicinity of clear springs and under the shade of odoriferous trees. On the latter I shall dwell in some fu

ture letter: at present I must conclude with the usual sentiments of attachment and regard.

LETTER IV.

The subject of emigration from Britain considered. History of an emigrant farmer. Kentuckey peopled by a puffing publication. Lord Selkirk's colonizations. District least pernicious for emigrants.

Pittsburg, November, 1806.

As the portrait which I gave you in my last, of this town and its vicinity, might dispose some minds on your side of the water to emigration, it will be but fair and honest for me to consider that subject rather minutely, and shew you how far such a measure would tend to their happiness or otherwise. For this

purpose let us suppose an individual determined to abandon the land of his nativity, and to break the chain of early attachments and maturer friendships, to go-whither? To a country of which scarcely any but unfaithful delineators have written; to regions described by persons who meant to impose on the public, by giving lavish and flattering details of which they themselves had only heard. One place is said to be "a paradise, where man enjoys the felicities of the golden age;" and another is represented as a fit residence for gods." Alas! these are the reports either of travellers who conceive that they must not speak the truth, or perhaps of indigent writers who never were out of London. Such compositions are a kind of romance, intended to amuse, not to instruct; to please, but convey no intelligence and this is the dangerous effect of an opinion, that the public taste would