"Have you any neighbours?"
"Frogs."
There are only two methods (besides rare accidents) by which dwellers in such places can get their wants supplied. When a few other neighbours besides frogs, gather round the settler, some one opens a grocery store. I went shopping near the Falls of Niagara; about a quarter of a mile from which place, there is a store on the borders of the forest. I saw there glass and bacon; stay-laces, prints, drugs, rugs, and crockery; bombazeens and tin cans; books, boots, and moist sugar, &c. &c.
Pedlars are the other agents of supply. It has been mentioned how bibles and other books are sold by youths who adopt this method of speedily raising money. The Yankee pedlars, with their wooden clocks, are renowned. One of these gentry lately retired with a fortune of a hundred thousand dollars, made by the sale of wooden clocks alone. These men are great benefactors to society: for, be their clocks what they may, they make the country people as well off as the inhabitants of towns, in the matter of knowing the time; and what more would they have? One would think there was no sun in the United States, so very imaginative are most of the population in respect of the hour. Even in New York I found a wide difference between the upper and lower parts of the city: and between Canandaigua and Buffalo there was the slight variation of half an hour. In some parts of the south, we were at the mercy of whatever clock the last pedlar might have happened to bring, for the appearance of meals: but it appeared as if the clocks themselves had something of the Yankee spirit in them; for, while they were usually too fast, I rarely knew one too slow.
The perplexity about time took a curious form in one instance, in the south. The lady of the governor of the State had never had sufficient energy to learn the clock. With both clock and watch in the house, she was incessantly sending her slave Venus, (lazy, ignorant, awkward, and ugly,) into a neighbour's house to ask the hour. Three times in one morning did Venus loll against the drawing-room door, her chin in her hands, drawling,
"What's the time?"
"Nine, Venus."
Venus went home, and told her mistress it was one. Dinner was hastened; but it soon appearing from some symptom that it could not be so late, Venus appeared again, with her chin reposing as before.
"What's the time?"