atural history which, if it be fact and not
fiction, certainly gave him the best of the argument: he declared, with
the utmost vehemence, that the sand of the pine woods on the mainland
across the river literally swarmed with fleas--that in the uninhabited
places the sand itself was full of them, and that so far from being a
result of human habitation, they were found in less numbers round the
negro huts on the mainland than in the lonely woods around them.

The ploughing is at length fairly inaugurated, and there is a regular
jubilee among the negroes thereat. After discoursing fluently on the
improvements likely to result from the measure, Jack wound up by saying he
had been afraid it would not be tried on account of the greater scarcity,
and consequently greater value, of horses over men in these parts--a
modest and slave-like conclusion.

* * * * *

Dearest E----. I walked up to-day, _February 14th_, to see that land of
promise the ploughed field: it did not look to me anything like as heavy
soil as the cold wet sour stiff clay I have seen turned up in some of the
swampy fields round Lenox; and as for the cypress roots which were urged
as so serious an impediment, they are not much more frequent, and
certainly not as resisting, as the granite knees and elbows that stick out
through the scanty covering of the said clay, which mother earth allows
herself as sole garment for her old bones in many a Berkshire patch of
corn. After my survey, as I walked home, I came upon a gang of lusty
women, as the phrase is here for women in the family-way; they were
engaged in burning stubble, and I was nearly choked while receiving the
multitudinous complaints and compliments with which they overwhelmed me.
After leaving them, I wandered along the river side on the dyke homeward,
rejoicing in the buds and green things putting forth their tender shoots
on every spray, in the early bees and even the less amiable wasps busy in
the sunshine with flowers--(weeds I suppose they should be called),
already opening their sweet temptations to them, and giving the earth a
spring aspect, such as it does not wear with you in Massachusetts till
late in May.

In the afternoon I took my accustomed row: there had been a tremendous ebb
tide, the consequence of which was to lay bare portions of the banks which
I had not seen before. The cypress roots form a most extraordinary mass of
intertwined wood-work, so closel