His opinion of the country he summed up thus: "If a man should be so unfortunate as to have married a wife of a capricious disposition, let him take her to America, and keep her there three or four years in a country-place at some distance from a town, and afterwards bring her back to England; if she do not act with propriety, he may be sure there is no remedy." I have rearranged his account in such a way as to make it consecutive, but otherwise it stands as originally published.
He praised the soil very highly.

I asked him if he was acquainted with the land at Mount Vernon.

He said he was; and represented it to be rich land, but not so rich as his.

Yet his I thought very poor indeed; for it was (as is termed in America) _gullied_; which I call broken land.
This effect is produced by the winter's frost and summer's rain, which cut the land into cavities of from ten feet wide and ten feet deep (and upwards) in many places; and, added to this, here and there a hole, which makes it look altogether like marlpits, or stone-quarries, that have been carried away by those hasty showers in the summer, which no man who has not seen them in this climate could form any idea of or believe possible....
In two days after we left this place, we came in sight of Mount Vernon; but in all the way up the river, I did not see any green fields.

The country had to me a most barren appearance.