ction of every city
extends at least twenty miles; and where the towns lie wider, they
have much more ground. No town desires to enlarge its bounds, for the
people consider themselves rather as tenants than landlords.

They have built, over all the country, farmhouses for husbandmen;
which are well contrived, and furnished with all things necessary for
country labor. Inhabitants are sent, by turns, from the cities to
dwell in them; no country family has fewer than forty men and women in
it, besides two slaves. There is a master and a mistress set over
every family, and over thirty families there is a magistrate. Every
year twenty of this family come back to the town after they have
stayed two years in the country, and in their room there are other
twenty sent from the town, that they may learn country work from those
that have been already one year in the country, as they must teach
those that come to them the next from the town. By this means such as
dwell in those country farms are never ignorant of agriculture, and so
commit no errors which might otherwise be fatal and bring them under a
scarcity of corn. But tho there is every year such a shifting of the
husbandmen, to prevent any man being forced against his will to follow
that hard course of life too long, yet many among them take such
pleasure in it that they desire leave to continue in it many years.

These husbandmen till the ground, breed cattle, hew wood and convey it
to the towns either by land or water, as is most convenient. They
breed an infinite multitude of chickens in a very curious manner: for
the hens do not sit and hatch them, but a vast number of eggs are laid
in a gentle and equal heat in order to be hatched; and they are no
sooner out of the shell, and able to stir about, but they seem to
consider those that feed them as their mothers, and follow them as
other chickens do the hen that hatched them. They breed very few
horses, but those they have are full of mettle, and are kept only for
exercising their youth in the art of sitting and riding them; for they
do not put them to any work, either of plowing or carriage, in which
they employ oxen. For tho their horses are stronger, yet they find
oxen can hold out longer; and as they are not subject to so many
diseases, so they are kept upon a less charge and with less trouble.
And even when they are so worn out that they are no more fit for
labor, they are good meat at last. They sow no corn but that