may not be inappropriate to turn our attention, for a moment, to the agriculture of the natives.

Most of the hard work among the Indians, it is well known, fell to the lot of the women, with the assistance, sometimes, of the old men and little boys. Among their thankless tasks was that of farming, which they carried on to an extent quite remarkable, when we consider the rudeness of the implements with which they had to work, and the circumstances in which they were placed. They had no art of manufacturing metal, and, of course, could have no suitable contrivances for tilling the ground. Their cultivation was not so rude, however, as one would naturally suppose. They made a kind of hoe by tying the shoulder-blade of a moose, bear, or deer, to a stick or pole, and managed to do much of the work with that.

The land, when selected, was cleared by keeping up a fire around the foot of each tree till its bark was so burned that it would die. Then they planted their corn. When a tree fell, it was burned into pieces of such length that they could be rolled into a heap and burned to ashes. In this way, by degrees, a piece covered with wood was wholly cleared. An industrious woman could burn off as many dry, fallen logs in a day as a strong man could, at that time, cut with an axe in two or three. They used a stone axe, made much in the same manner as the hoe above described, to scrape the charred surface of the logs and hasten the burning. This mode of clearing was pretty common among the natives in different parts of the country. Sometimes the tree was first girdled with the axe and thus killed, allowed to become dry, and then burned by kindling a fire around it, as above described. Several of these stone axes, of different sizes, are now in my possession.

The Indians taught the settlers to select the finest ears of corn for seed, to plant it at a proper time, to weed it, and to hill it. They were accustomed to dig small holes four feet apart, with a clumsy instrument resembling the one described, which was made, not unfrequently, of a large clamshell. Those living in the vicinity of the sea-shore put into each hole a horse-shoe crab or two, or a fish, upon which they dropped four, and sometimes six kernels of corn, and covered it with the implement with which they had dug the hole. The use

of fish in the hill as a fertilizer was common, also, in the interior. Beans were planted with the corn after it had come up, and grew up supported by it.

Great attention was paid to the protection of their crops from weeds, while the corn was carefully guarded from destruction by insects and birds. To prevent loss by the latter, a small watch-house was erected in the midst of a field of corn, in which one of the family, often the eldest child, slept, and early in the morning rose to watch the birds. It was their universal custom to hill the corn, often from one to two feet high, for its support, and spots are often seen at the present day which were evidently cultivated by them. The colonists very generally imitated this custom, and it has been continued down to our own times in many parts of the country. The men planted and cured their tobacco, which was, ordinarily, the only plant they worked upon, the women managing all the rest.

This brief sketch of the farming of the Indians would not be complete without an allusion to their mode of storing grain for their winter supply. Large holes were dug in the earth, and the sides carefully lined. with bark; this was also the work of the women. The corn and the beans, after being dried in the sun, or on rocks or flakes over a fire, were thrown into these holes, and then they were covered up level with the surface of the ground. They were thus preserved, if necessary, through the winter. These excavated barns were carefully concealed by the women from their lazy husbands and sons, lest they should discover and eat up their contents; yet, with all the care they could take, the hogs of the colonists often unhinged their barn-doors, and helped themselves to the golden treasure. History says that one of these Indian barns was discovered by the pilgrims at Truro, at a time when their store of provisions was so reduced as to contain but five kernels of corn to each individual.

They sometimes made additional provision for winter by means of large boxes of wicker-work, or bags or sacks of hemp, which were filled and kept in the wigwam for the more immediate wants of the family. They had, of course, little or no occasion to cut grass, though it grew in abundance along the marshes and the rivers, and in places which had been cleared for cultivation. was of a coarse quality, and served the colo

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nists a good turn till they resorted to the cultivation of better.

We may imagine the surprise of the natives at the first sight of a plough. They could not understand so complicated a machine. They wanted to see it work; and when it tore up more ground in a day than they, with their clam-shells, could scrape up in a month, and they saw the colter and the share to be of iron, they told the ploughman if he was not the devil himself, he was very much like him.

The first sight of a ship, it is recorded, had excited their wonder even to a greater extent. To them it was a floating island; its masts were nothing but trees; its sails were clouds; its discharge of guns was thunder and lightning; but as soon as the thunder and lightning ceased, they pushed off their canoes to go and pick strawberries on the island!

This cursory glance at the early surroundings of the settlers of the country, will enable us the better to comprehend the difficulties in the way of making rapid progress. When poor and miserable cattle, poor and miserable implements, poor and miserable ideas of farming were the best of every thing they had, we can well imagine that little was done which was not forced upon them by the pressure of necessity. Their wants were too many, and required too vigorous exertions to provide what was indispensable, to admit of their spending time to experiment or seek out new principles to be applied to practical farming. As long as new lands could be had almost for the asking, it was not to be expected that they would till them very thoroughly. The soil was rich in mould-the accumulation of ages-and did not require very careful cultivation to secure an abundant return. But years of constant cropping exhausted its productiveness, when other lands were taken to subject to the same process. The farmer raised wheat year after year on the same land, till the soil became too poor, and then he planted corn; and when it would no longer grow corn, he sowed barley, or rye, and so on to beans.

Agriculture, so far as any real improvement was concerned, was, therefore, naturally enough, in a state of extreme depression for more than a century and a half after the establishment of colonies in various parts of the country. There were few intelligent cultivators previous to the Revolution, and there was no spirit of inquiry to give a charm to

farm labor. It was performed as an evil which must be endured from stern necessity. Hard work was the order of the day. The forests were to be cleared, the buildings for shelter erected, the stone walls to be laid, and little time or inclination was left for the "humanities” of life.

The inhabitants of country towns, a hundred years ago, most of whom were, of course, engaged in tilling the soil, seldom visited even their neighboring towns, and many a farmer and farmer's son did not leave his own township from one year's end to another. The liberalizing influence of social intercourse was unknown and unappreciated, unless the village tavern and the frequent glass might be considered as forming an exception, while it afforded an opportunity, of which most men availed themselves, of form ing new acquaintances and talking over the stale gossip of the neighborhood, or indulging in the ribald jest.

People for some miles around turned out to a "raising," as the erection of a frame building was termed, and a merry time it was, where the flip and the cider flowed like water. On a more limited scale, the "huskings" brought together, also, a pretty large neighborhood, when the same favorite drinks did much to enliven a long autumn evening, the whole being followed by a sumptuous repast of pumpkin pies, etc., continued into the small hours of the night. Then the "spinning bees" afforded a time for talk, and song, and riddle. Election day often, however, brought the people from a greater distance.

No butcher drove up to the farmer's door, with his ever fresh supply of meats, to give variety to the daily and homely fare; no baker, with his jingling bells, travelled his rounds on stated days to relieve the monotony of the housewife's toil. Salted meats were the almost universal food from autumn till spring, and often from spring till autumn, though now and then a sheep or a lamb fell a victim to the necessity for change. No cottons, no calicoes, no ginghams, no linens, no flannels loaded the counters of the village store, to be had at a sixpence, or a ninepence, or a quarter a yard. The farmer, and the farmer's family, wore homespun, and the spinning-wheel and the huge timber loom were a part of nearly every household furniture, and their noise was rarely silenced. If linens were wanted, the flax was sown, and weeded, and pulled, and rotted, and broken, and swingled-for all