"It Is Because The Deer Has No Gall," Answered The Man, "That The Pison
Don't Take Effect.
But their meat will not do to eat, except in a small
quantity, and cooked with pork, which I think helps take the pison out of
it."
"The deer," he went on to say, "are now passing out of the blue into the
gray. After the holidays, when their hair becomes long, and their winter
coat is quite grown, their hide is soft and tender, and tears easily when
dressed, and it would be folly to kill them, even if there were no law
against it." He went on to find a parallel to the case of the deer-skins
in the hides of neat-cattle, which, when brought from a hot country, like
South America, are firmer and tougher than when obtained in a colder
climate like ours.
The Wyoming traveller gave a bad account of the health, just at present,
of the beautiful valley in which he lived. "We have never before," said
he, "known what it was to have the fever and ague among us, but now it is
very common, as well as other fevers. The season has neither been
uncommonly wet nor uncommonly dry, but it has been uncommonly hot." I
heard the same account of various other districts in Pennsylvania. Mifflin
county, for example, was sickly this season, as well as other parts of the
state which, hitherto have been almost uniformly healthy. Here, however,
in Stroudsburg and its neighborhood, they boasted that the fever and ague
had never yet made its appearance.
I was glad to hear a good account of the pecuniary circumstances of the
Pennsylvania farmers. They got in debt like every body else during the
prosperous years of 1835 and 1836, and have been ever since working
themselves gradually out of it. "I have never," said an intelligent
gentleman of Stroudsburg, "known the owners of the farms so free from
debt, and so generally easy and prosperous in their condition, as at this
moment." It is to be hoped that having been so successful in paying their
private debts, they will now try what can be done with the debt of the
state.
We left Stroudsburg this morning - one of the finest mornings of this
autumnal season - and soon climbed an eminence which looked down upon
Cherry Hollow. This place reminded me, with the exception of its forests,
of the valleys in the Peak of Derbyshire, the same rounded summits, the
same green, basin-like hollows. But here, on the hill-sides, were tall
groves of oak and chestnut, instead of the brown heath; and the large
stone houses of the German householders were very unlike the Derbyshire
cottages. The valley is four miles in length, and its eastern extremity is
washed by the Delaware. Climbing out of this valley and passing for some
miles through yellow woods and fields of springing corn, not Indian corn,
we found ourselves at length travelling on the side of another long
valley, which terminates at its southern extremity in the Wind Gap.
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