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CHAPTER V.

By steamboat from St John to Portland, in Maine, and thence by railway to Newhaven, in Connecticut.-Alleged rudeness of American manners.-Country houses along the approach to Boston.-Drought in New England.-Farming in Connecticut and Massachusetts.— Diffusion of agricultural periodicals.—Cider-making in Connecticut.— Yale College. Number of Students.-Expense of residence.-Inferior position of professional men.—Salaries of clergymen.—Estimation of lawyers and medical men.-Favouring of quacks in the majority of the States.-Medical schools in the United States.-Opening for European medical practitioners.-Elm-trees of Newhaven.-Treetoad.- Fairhaven; its oyster-trade.-Two species of American oysters of large size. Consumption of oysters in Massachusetts.-Railway to Albany up the Housatonic valley.-Light soils and Indian corn of this valley. Post-tertiary clays and sands of the upper valley of the Hudson River and of Lake Champlain.—Natural forests which grow upon them.-Power of their soils to resist drought.-Exhalation from the leaves of plants.--Relation of the porosity of a soil to this exhalation. Why drained and mellowed clay is moister in a hot summer than undrained.—Schenectady.-Valley of the Mohawk.—Character of its soils and produce.-Rich bottoms of the Mohawk resting on the Utica slate.-Broom corn, (Sorghum saccharatum,) its extensive cultivation in this valley.-German flats.-Utica a thriving manufacturing town.-German population.—Change in the meaning of familiar words. Importance of keeping the English language pure.-Choice of judges by popular election.—Apparent danger of this practice.— Titular judges and generals.-Popped corn.-Structure of Indian corn.-Extraction of oil from this grain in the Western States.-Flour of Indian corn; varieties in its colour; used in the adulteration of wheaten flour.-Digestive powers of animals.-City of Rome.-Mr Clay.-Verona.-Change in the character of the country.—Arrival at

Syracuse.

SEPT. 4.—At eight in the morning, I went on board the small steamer which plied between St John and

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ALLEGED RUDENESS OF THE PEOPLE.

the town of Eastport, in Maine, on my way to the state of New York. Steaming in the Bay of Fundy is not always agreeable, even in large boats. The day was fine, however, and we made the distance of seventy miles to Eastport in about eight hours. There we were received on board of a larger steamer, which conveyed us to Portland, in Maine, by half-past eight on the following morning, in time for a railway train about to start for Boston. At 2 P.M. I arrived in Boston, being five and a half hours for a hundred and eleven miles, five hours being the usual time. Starting again at 4 P.M. from Boston by the New York line, I reached Newhaven, in Connecticut, at 11 P.M., being a hundred and sixty miles in seven hours, or about twenty-three miles an hour.

In this rapid run through New England, only three things made a permanent impression on my mind. These were, first, that the general rudeness of the people which travellers speak of is not perceptible in New England generally. It may be more striking in the Western States; but if, on our home railways, all classes were indiscriminately mixed up in large carriages-cars, as they call them here-containing fifty or sixty people, I doubt if Old England passengers would, as a whole, behave as well as those of New England do. The second thing was the numerous country boxes or cottages, of all fashions and sizes, with their white painted walls and green jalousies, which skirted the railway during the last twenty miles of our ride to Boston. This is a peculiarly English feature, and indicates the existence among our Transatlantic kindred of that love of green fields, and of a quiet country life, which characterises so much our island-home. By the operation of this feeling, as is the case around our own great cities, the wealth of the growing commercial city of Boston is carried out to the country residences of its

GROWTH OF TOBACCO.

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merchants, and is on a thousand spots in course of being expended in clearing and improving the stony and in fertilising the gravelly and sandy soils of which a large portion of the surface of Massachusetts consists. And my third observation was, that though the drought of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had extended into Maine, its effects became less perceptible as I advanced westward into the other New England States, till, in Connecticut, the fields looked as beautifully green as I had seen them last at the mouth of the Mersey; and the after-grass was abundant.

Along the Connecticut River, which runs through the centre of this state, there is much good land, and tobacco in considerable quantity is grown upon it. The produce per acre is from 1500 to 2500 pounds of marketable tobacco. This is a very exhausting crop, as all leaf crops are; and land must be generously used which is to continue long to yield crops such as these.

The farming of Connecticut is said to have greatly improved during the last fifteen years, and this is ascribed in part, and probably with some truth, to the extensive circulation and perusal of agricultural papers. In the small country town of Farmington, (of two thousand inhabitants,) for example, a friend of mine assured me that not less that fifty agricultural papers were taken in by the inhabitants. And most of these papers-the American Agriculturist and American Cultivator, for example—are really well and usefully got up, and filled with valuable information.

A similar improving character is ascribed to the farming of Massachusetts, but less is said in favour of New Hampshire and other parts of New England. Of the first settlers in Connecticut and Massachusetts, many were from the west and south-west of England, from which places they naturally brought some parts of their old home husbandry, as that of apple-growing and cider

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making. The quantity of cider formerly made and drunk in this state is said to have been immense. It is, I suppose, from this being a staple branch of husbandry, that our home saying, "Great cry and little wool," originating in the noise made at the scraping of a pig, has here assumed the form of "More cry than cider."

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9th Sept.-Newhaven in Connecticut is known in Europe chiefly as the seat of Yale College, one of the oldest and most respected of the academical institutions in the United States. It was founded in 1700, has at present 531 resident students, of whom 386 are undergraduates, 52 students in its theological, 33 in its law, and 41 in its medical school. The Orthodox Congregational body are the prevailing denomination in the state of Connecticut; and Yale College, though in no way exclusive, and having no tests, is under the management of trustees and instructors, who are for the most part of this denomination. Rooms are provided in the college buildings for about one-half of the under-graduates, the rest living in lodgings in the town, and all dining in private houses or clubs, as is the custom in the German universities. The total annual expense of a residence at college is about 150 dollars, or a little more than thirty pounds, made up as follows,

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So that about 200 dollars, or £42 sterling, will, on a liberal scale, defray all the necessary residence expenses of under-graduates. The medical institution in connec

*The above was in session '49-50. In the present of '50-51, the number of under-graduates is 432, and the whole number of resident students, 555.

POSITION OF PROFESSIONAL MEN.

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tion with Yale College was established in 1810, and the theological department as late as 1822. The former has six and the latter four professors. I do not know whether the expense of the purely professional education is greater than that of students in arts. A step has recently been taken towards a provision of special education for the agricultural and higher industrial classes, by the establishment of chairs of chemistry in its application to the arts, and of chemistry in its relations to agriculture and physiology. These departments have been placed respectively under the charge of Benjamin Silliman, jun., whose father has so long enjoyed a European reputation, and, by his writings, made his college known where otherwise it would never have been heard of; and of my friend, and former pupil, Professor Norton, who is already favourably known in this country, as well as in his own.

A circumstance which early strikes the European traveller in the United States, is the comparatively small consideration in which professional men are held, and the small salaries they in general receive. The former may be supposed to arise from the more universal diffusion of a certain amount of instruction than is the case in most European countries-and this is no doubt in part the cause. But it is partly due also to the theoretical and practical political equality of all citizens, which appears to induce, among the masses of ordinarily educated men, an impression that higher intellectual gifts or attainments are, generally speaking, no sufficient reasons for social distinctions or higher consideration. Every man you meet thinks himself capable of giving an opinion upon questions of the most difficult kind; and, for the most part, the masses seem, by their choice at public elections, to prefer to be guided by the less rather than by the more educated of their fellow-citizens.

In the country districts, five to eight hundred dollars

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