lds of thinly cultivated
land. These were yet spotted over with stumps of trees, that seemed to
leave but little freedom to the course of the ploughshare, and bespoke a
thriftless and slovenly tillage. A piece of half cleared ground,
occupying the side of one of the adjacent hills, presented to the eye of
our travellers a yet more uncouth spectacle. This spot was still clothed
with the native trees of the forest, all of which had been
death-stricken by the axe, and now heaved up their withered and sapless
branches towards the heavens, without leaf or spray. In the phrase of
the woodman, they had been _girdled_ some years before, and were
destined to await the slow decay of time in their upright attitude. It
was a grove of huge skeletons that had already been bleached into an
ashy hue by the sun, and whose stiff and dry members rattled in the
breeze with a preternatural harshness. Amongst the most hoary of these
victims of the axe, the gales of winter had done their work and thrown
them to the earth, where the shattered boles and boughs lay as they had
fallen, and were slowly reverting into their original dust. Others,
whose appointed time had not yet been fulfilled, gave evidence of their
struggle with the frequent storm, by their declination from the
perpendicular line. Some had been caught in falling by the boughs of a
sturdier neighbor, and still leaned their huge bulks upon these
supports, awakening the mind of the spectator to the fancy, that they
had sunk in some deadly paroxysm into charitable and friendly arms, and,
thus locked together, abided their tardy but irrevocable doom. It was a
field of the dead; and the more striking in its imagery from the
contrast which it furnished to the rich, verdurous, and lively forest
that, with all the joyousness of health, encompassed this blighted spot.
Its aspect was one of unpleasant desolation; and the traveller of the
present day who visits our western wilds, where this slovenly practice
is still in use, will never pass through such a precinct without a sense
of disgust at the disfiguration of the landscape.

The field thus marred might have contained some fifty acres, and it was
now occupied, in the intervals between the lifeless trunks, with a
feeble crop of Indian corn, whose husky and parched blades, as they
fluttered in the evening wind, added new and appropriate features to the
inexpressible raggedness of the scene. The same effect was further aided
and preserved b