Sometimes Feeling The Spontaneous Courage Of A Man, I Seem To Wish For The Decisive Minute; The Next Instant A Message From My Wife, Sent By One Of The Children, Quite Unmans Me.

Away goes my courage, and I descend again into the deepest despondency:

At last, finding it was a false alarm, we return once more to our beds; but what good can the sleep of nature do us, when interrupted with _such_ scenes?"

* * * * *

But we will suppose our planter to have escaped the scalping knife and tomahawk; and in the course of years situate in a thick, settled neighbourhood of planters like himself, who have struggled through all the foregoing difficulties: he is now a man of some consequence, builds a house by the side of his former hut, which now serves him for a kitchen; and as he is comfortably situate, we will leave him to the enjoyment of the fruits of his industry.

Such a being has often ideas of liberty, and a contempt of vassalage and slavery, which do honour to human nature.

The planter I have endeavoured to describe, I have supposed to be sober and industrious: but when a man of an opposite description makes such an attempt, he often degenerates into a demisavage; he cultivates no more land than will barely supply the family with bread, or rather makes his wife, and children perform that office. His whole employment is to procure skins, and furs, to exchange for rum, brandy, and ammunition; for this purpose he is often for several days together in the woods, without seeing a human being. He is by no means at a loss; his rifle supplies him with food, and at night he cuts down some boughs with his tomahawk, and constructs a _wigwam_[Footnote: The Indian name for their huts so constructed.], in which he spends the night, stretched on the skins of those animals he has killed in the course of his excursion. This manner of living he learned from his savage neighbours, the Indians, and like them calls every other state of life _slavery_. It sometimes happens, that an unsuccessful back settler joins the Indians at war with the states. When this is the case, it is observed he is, if possible, more cruel than his new allies; he eagerly imbibes all the vices of the savages, without a single spark of their virtues. Farewell,

Yours &c.

_Philadelphia, March 18th, 1794_.

Dear Friend,

My present intention is to give you some conception of the family of a planter, whose ancestors had in some degree gone through all the difficulties I described in my last.

We will suppose them descended from the original english emigrants, who came over with Penn; like them, to possess a high sense of religion; and that this family are now in the quiet possession of about three hundred acres of land, their own _property_[Footnote: There are very few _farms_ properly so called in the United States.], situate in Pennsylvania, about seventy or eighty miles from Philadelphia.

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