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a public fund, which, appropriately secured, would relieve the town from an immense burden in its taxation; or its proceeds, invested for educational or beneficent objects, would diffuse unmeasured blessings among the people. Mr. Johnson remarked to me that he recollected when the whole district from Brushville to the present Hicksville, a distance of about twelve miles, was an open common, but which now embraces some of the best grass farms in Queens county. Occasionally the plains are penetrated from the sides by farms which show long cultivation, and date their occupation, by some squatter or pre-emptive rights, to a period anterior to the Revolution. These are generally valuable tracts. The original extent of the common lands has also been much reduced by modern encroachments of those who occupy contiguous lands. Farms which formerly contained fifty and sixty acres have grown by this process until now many of them contain from one to two hundred acres.
It will be recollected that Cobbett occupied a farm on the north borders of Hempstead plains. The first year, he states, he had no manure except four hundred bushels he swept together, on the land, by means of a broom. He applied to the land sixty bushels of this quality of manure to the acre, for a crop of ruta baga, and realized that season, a harvest of six hundred and forty bushels of the ruta baga to the acre. After referring to these results, to the caution he received against deep plowing, and giving a description of the soil, he uses this forcible language: "and yet people are flocking to the western countries in pursuit of rich land, while thousands of acres of such land as I occupy are lying waste on Long Island, within three hours' drive of the all-consuming and incessantly increasing city of New York."
The Bush Plains.—Proceeding east from the Hempstead plains, we enter near Farmingdale another territory, and as strange as is the aspect of the Hempstead prairie, this new scene is still more novel and impressive. This is the woodland or Bush plains of the island, and more familiarly designated the "Long Island barrens." The ground is chiefly occupied for a number of miles by a thick growth of low shrubby bushes, then succeeds a tract covered by small oaks, pine, and a heavy burthen of what is here called scrub oaks, but it is not the tree generally known by that name. This shrub is ladened by a copious crop of acorns, which formerly, it is said, attracted the bear as well as the deer to these wilds. The entire surface, through these plains, is clothed in a heavy mantle of rank and coarse vegetation. The primitive forests, which consisted mainly of oaks, chestnuts and pines, have long since disappeared, although their former presence is indicated here and there by decaying stumps. I was informed that these lands, when they escape the ravages of fire, yield from the timber that now occupies them, a product of fire-wood once in fifteen or twenty years.
The strangeness and wild aspect of the scenery is beautiful and impressive, and the mind can scarcely comprehend the fact that such utter stillness and seclusion and such an exhibition of nature, in more than its primeval rudeness, should occur within three hours' ride of the great metropo-
