RATES OF WAGES IN NEW BRUNSWICK.

129

sparse population extend nearly all the way along the northern shores of the Bay of Fundy, from St John to St Andrews, a distance of sixty-five miles. It is repulsive, therefore, to the emigrant, and will be occupied and tilled much more slowly than some of those inland parts of the province of which I have already spoken.

Dr Peters had two farm-servants, to each of whom he paid £40 a-year without board. Mr Macarthy, on the dyked land, gave his head-man £30 currency in money, with a house, fuel, potatoes, and a cow; and to his other men from £15 to £25, besides their board. But in St John, and the adjoining counties, wages are lower than in any other part of the province, because so many (especially of the Irish) emigrants linger here-as they do elsewhere near the port they arrive at, and work for smaller wages rather than proceed into the interior, where better land and better wages are to be obtained.

The following table exhibits the average rate of wages for agricultural labour in the several counties of the province, in addition to board, washing, and lodging, in sterling money :

The wages at the present time in Berwickshire (Scot

VOL. I.

I

130

PROSPECTS OF THE LABOURER.

land) for an able-bodied man, who can manage a pair of horses, is £14 to £16 a-year, with board and lodging. The wages in New Brunswick, therefore, even in the depressed state of home agriculture, are not so much greater as to induce the farm-labourer, who can obtain employment, to emigrate to this colony for the purpose of working as a labourer. But the prospective advantage to him is, that he can obtain land for himself at so cheap a rate, when—after working a year or two for wages, (which I would recommend him contentedly to do,) till he has obtained so much acquaintance with the country and its customs as to enable him judiciously to select a location for himself he has saved money enough to pay the first instalment for his land, and keep his family during the first winter season.

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

132

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.

133

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