in most seasons, but sometimes totally fail; grapes grow wild and tame, i.e. cultivated or imported; cherries are not very good, and dearer than at Pittsburgh; pears, strawberries, and raspberries are not so choice as with you; quinces are plentiful and fine; wild plums perfume the whole house, like jessamine or mignionette, and are excellent for pies and tarts.  The persimon is a fruit to which you are a stranger; it may be ranked with the plums, but has four stones, and is not fit to eat till bitten by the frost, when its austere and astringent taste disappears, and it becomes nearly transparent, and as rich and sweet as Guava jelly.  The May-apple, or Mandrake, a wild fruit, is a favourite with our young folks; it grows on a single-steemed plant, usually one foot high, and is about the size of a plum, but with seeds, and in taste resembling a highly flavoured pear.  The custard-apple, or paw-paw, is my favourite, and my boys go with me into the woods to gather them when ripe.  In the summer, water melons, musk melons, nutmeg melons, and Cantaloupes may be seen in large heaps in the market, or in carts or wagons, at 6-1/4 to 25 and 50 cts. each, some weighing 40 lbs.

Egg-plants, which you have seen as curiosities, are here brought to market; some of them of purple colour, are as large as a child’s carpet-ball:  they are sliced and fried in butter, and I am told have the flavour of fried oysters.  Cucumbers are unfortunately superabundant, and the free use of them induces a variety of diseases which are attributed to the climate.  Squashes, cimolins, and cushas, are gourds which are mashed up with butter like turnips; pumpkins of this country are very sweet, and make delicious pies, or rather cheesecakes; cranberries are brought from a distance, and pine-apples are not very expensive, being brought up the river from Bermuda.

Among the natural curiosities of the country, are the Stone Mountain in Carolina, which may rank in antiquity with Stonehenge.  It is remarkable for a circular wall of stone of great thickness, probably built by a people distinct from the present race of Indians, who are quite incapable of erecting any building except a wigwam, or a pile of loose stones over a grave.  Next is the Kentucky Cavern, or as it is called, on account of its magnitude, the Mammoth Cave.  I have an account before me of its being explored by a party in 1826, who penetrated into this gloomy, though spacious, hollow for fifteen miles, and were prevented from proceeding from extreme fatigue; they found the names of persons written at the farthest part.  There are numbers of rooms as they are called, which are yet unexplored.  In one of these, a few miles from the entrance, there was discovered many years since, a female figure sitting with a mat wrapped round her shoulders; she was quite dried to a mummy, and has for many years been exhibited in a caravan, through the United States.