“From Baltimore.”
“Do you take in any corn now from round here?”
“When I first began to trade, I used to take in a great deal; but now, except from yourself, Captain Rhines, Ben, Joe Griffin, and one or two more, I don’t get five bushels in a year; but I sell lots to the people round here.”
“It seems to me, when a people get so much taken up with building vessels, fishing, cutting masts and ton timber, to send to England, that they have to go to the southerd to buy corn to export, feed their cattle in the logging swamps, bread their families, and fat their hogs, they are in rather a poor way; that there’s more talk than cider; that they ain’t getting rich so fast as they appear to be; when they raise but little except on burns, never hauling out their dressing, or ploughing the land, but keep going over and over, skimming and skimming, that by and by they will have a very poor set of carcasses left, and that if there should come a war, and all this exportation be stopped, there would be pretty blue times. I don’t pretend to know, but it appears to me that’s about the way things are done round here, and all over the District of Maine.”
“I never thought of that before,” said Charlie.
“Nor I either,” said John.
“It’s just as Uncle Isaac says,” said Fred, “just to a T. When I first began to trade, almost everybody had a few bushels of corn to sell, some a good deal; and I never sold a bushel of corn, or meal, except to fishermen from some other place; if any of our people wanted corn, wheat or barley, they went to their neighbors.”
“I have thought a good deal about it,” said Uncle Isaac, “and I’ve talked the matter over with Captain Rhines and Benjamin; it strikes them pretty much as it does me; they ought to be better judges than me, because they’ve had greater privileges. I helped about the Hard-scrabble and the Casco, because I wanted to start you boys, build up the place, and make business; but it never will do to have the eggs all in one basket, for all to be ship-builders, lumbermen, or fishermen. A ship don’t produce anything; she is herself a product, manned from the land, and victualled from the land; everything comes from the ground; we ourselves were made out of it; there must be farmers to feed the rest. I mean, for the future, to put my money into the land, except I see special reasons for helping somebody.”