All this is not only matter of historical record, but in the natural
order of things. The first settlers of America were originally a noble
stock. These, their descendants, had been reared under circumstances
every way calculated to give them manly beauty and noble forms. They had
breathed a free and a salubrious air. The field and forest exercise
yielded them salutary viands, and appetite and digestion corresponding.
Life brought them the sensations of high health, herculean vigor, and
redundant joy.
When a social band of this description had planted their feet on the
virgin soil, the first object was to fix on a spot, central to the most
fertile tract of land that could be found, combining the advantages
usually sought by the first settlers. Among these was, that the station
should be on the summit of a gentle swell, where pawpaw, cane, and wild
clover, marked exuberant fertility; and where the trees were so sparse,
and the soil beneath them so free from underbrush, that the hunter could
ride at half speed. The virgin soil, as yet friable, untrodden, and not
cursed with the blight of politics, party, and feud, yielded, with
little other cultivation than planting, from eighty to a hundred bushels
of maize to the acre, and all other edibles suited to the soil and
climate, in proportion.
The next thing, after finding this central nucleus of a settlement, was
to convert it into a _station_, an erection which now remains to be
described. It was a desirable requisite, that a station should in close
or command a flush limestone spring, for water for the settlement.
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