The farmer's wife, and a young woman who looked like her sister, were spinning, and three little children were playing about.

The woman told me that they spun and wove all the cotton and woolen garments of the family, and knit all the stockings; her husband, though not a shoe-maker by trade, made all the shoes.

She manufactured all the soap and candles they used, and prepared her sugar from the sugar-trees on their farm.

All she wanted with money, she said, was to buy coffee, tea, and whiskey, and she could "get enough any day by sending a batch of butter and chicken to market." They used no wheat, nor sold any of their corn, which, though it appeared a very large quantity, was not more than they required to make their bread and cakes of various kinds, and to feed all their live stock during the winter.

She did not look in health, and said they had all had ague in "the fall;" but she seemed contented, and proud of her independence; though it was in somewhat a mournful accent that she said, "Tis strange to us to see company: I expect the sun may rise and set a hundred times before I shall see another _human_ that does not belong to the family." I have been minute in the description of this forest farm, as I think it the best specimen I saw of the back-wood's independence, of which so much is said in America.
These people were indeed independent, Robinson Crusoe was hardly more so, and they eat and drink abundantly; but yet it seemed to me that there was something awful and almost unnatural in their loneliness.