Travels In The United States Of America; Commencing In The Year 1793, And Ending In 1797. With The Author's Journals Of His Two Voyages Across The Atlantic By William Priest
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Live
Oak Is _Said_ To Be Very Superiour To All The Rest, And The Best
_Ship-Timber_ In The World.
I am informed it is a sort of evergreen,
seldom met with north of the Carolinas.
_Oct. 26th_. - Went to Philadelphia. - After crossing the Delaware, I found
the land very different from the Jersey shore; a fine stiff black soil,
the clover growing spontaneously. The city exhibited a most melancholy
spectacle; most of the houses and stores shut up, and grass growing in
many of the streets; what few _white_ inhabitants I met with had a most
dejected appearance. The disorder has been most favourable to the softer
sex; women with child, and those above and under a certain age, were in
general free from the infection: but so fatal has it proved to the other
sex, that, in Apple-tree-alley, which does not exceed fifty yards in
length, there are upwards of sixty widows within these two months. The
total loss on this melancholy occasion already exceeds four thousand,
nearly one tenth of the inhabitants! Returning to Woodbury, I met with a
quaker, who informed me of the _cause_ of the infectious disorder in the
Great City: "_It is_ a judgment on the inhabitants for their sins,
insomuch that they sent to England for a number of play-actors, singers,
and _musicians_, who were _actually arrived_; and as a just judgment on
the Philadelphians for encouraging these _children of iniquity_, they were
now afflicted with the yellow fever." I told him, that more likely the
sins of the _quakers_ had drawn down this judgment on the city _of
brotherly love_, and that it was now scourged for _their_ hypocrisy,
lying, canting, and other _manifold iniquities_.
_Oct.
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