bound. It will be many years, yet,
before they will be thought worth farming; not because they would not
yield well, but because there is so much land that yields better.

Some parts of the State are hilly, and covered with the finest timber.
The scenery of these tracts is equal to any of the kind in the United
States; and much of it has been long under cultivation, having been
early chosen by Southern settlers, who have grown old upon the soil.
Here and there, on these beautiful highlands, we find ancient ladies,
bright-eyed and cheerful, who tell us they have occupied the selfsame
house--built, Kentucky-fashion, with chimney outside--for forty years
or so. The legends these good dames have to tell are, no doubt, quite
as interesting in their way as those which Sir Walter Scott used to
thread the wilds of Scotland to gather up; but we value them not.
By-and-by, posterity will anathematize us for letting our old national
stories die in blind contempt or sheer ignorance of their value.

The only thing to be found fault with in the landscape is the want of
great fields full of stumps. It does not seem like travelling in a new
country to see all smooth and ready for the plough. Trees are not here
looked upon as natural enemies; and so, where they grow, there they
stand, and wave triumphant over the field like victors' banners. No
finer trees grow anywhere, and one loves to see them so prized. Yet we
miss the dear old stumps. My heart leaps up when I behold hundreds of
them so close together that you can hardly get a plough between. Long,
long years ago, I have seen a dozen men toiling in one little cleared
spot, jollily engaged in burning them with huge fires of brush-wood,
chopping at them with desperate axes, and tearing the less tenacious
out by the roots, with a rude machine made on the principle of that
instrument by the aid of which the dentist revenges you on an
offending tooth. The country looks tame, at first, without these
characteristic ornaments, so suggestive of human occupancy. The ground
is excellently fertile where stumps have been, and association makes
us rather distrustful of its goodness where nothing but grass has ever
grown.

The prairies are not as flat in surface as one expects to find them.
Except in the scarcity of trees, their surface is very much like other
portions of what is considered the best farming land. There are great
tracts of what are called bushy prairies, covered with a thick growt