Mr. Forsyth's Composition.

TAKE One bushel of fresh cow-dung, half a bushel of lime rubbish of old buildings (that from the ceiling of rooms is preferable) half a bushel of wood ashes, and a sixteenth part of a bushel of pit or riyer sand; the three last articles are to be sifted fine before they are mixed; then work them well together with a spade, afterward with a wooden beater, until the stuff is very smooth, like fine plaister used for the ceilings of rooms. As the best way of using this composition, is found by experience to be in a liquid state, it must be redu. ced to the consistence of pretty thick paint, by mixing it up with a sufficient quantity of urine and soap-suds, and laid on with a painter's brush.— Then take a quantity of dry powder of wood ashes, mixed with a sixth part of the same quantity of the ashes of burnt bones; put it into a tin box, with holes in the top, and after the composition has been applied, as above directed, shake the powder on its surface, till the whole is covered over with it, letting it remain for half an hour, to absorb the moisture; then apply more powder, rubbing it on gently with the hand, and repeating the application of the powder, till the whole applied composition becomes a dry smooth surface.

If any of the composition be left for a future ocIF casion, it should be kept in a tub, or other vessel; and urine of any kind poured upon it, so as to co

ver the surface; otherwise the atmosphere will greatly hurt the efficacy of the application.

WHERE lime rubbish of old buildings cannot be easily got, take pounded chalk, or common lime, after having been slaked a month at least.

LETTER

FROM THE HON. R. R. LIVINGSTON, TO EZRA L'HOMMEDIEU, ESQ.

DEAR SIR,

Dated, Paris, 7th Nov. 1803.

I HAVE written you two letters, but I have not

had the satisfaction of learning whether they have reached you. It is probable, that by the time this finds its way to you, the agricultural society will be about to assemble, and as I shall under every circumstance feel an interest in their prosperity, I could wish to have been able to collect such infor mation as might be useful to them: But I fear that this wish will be very imperfectly answered in what I am enabled to offer. The fact is, that the life of a public man in Paris affords very little leisure.— Business, ceremony, society, that your duty, your improvement, your pleasures lead you into, occupy every moment; and perhaps it is the only place in. the world in which a man is never at a loss for something to do. I have indeed availed myself of the few days that I could be spared from Paris, to

run over Flanders, Holland, and some of the southern departments of France. I have skirted Piedmont, Switzerland and the Alps. But in travelling by post your motion is too rapid to let you examine any thing thoroughly; this applied more particularly to me who was compelled to see what I did see in the least possible time.

INSTEAD therefore of giving you any thing like a regular detail, I will pray you to accept hasty and desultory remarks. It is however very satisfactory to be enabled to assure you, that from what I have seen, I have no reason to think that the farmers of our state, or those to the east of the Chesapeak, have much to learn from those of Europe, notwithstanding the idle boasts of travellers that visit our country.

Houses.

THROUGH the greater part of France that I have visited, the houses are made of a white stone, that underlays almost the whole of the country in various directions; where this is wanting, timber, plaister, and in some few places brick is used: upon houses of this kind no observations are necessary, but those which relate to their distribution; they are generally large for farm houses, and commonly have good rooms in the second story. But what contributes to their size, is, that it is almost a universal practice to annex the stable to the house, so that the farmer goes directly from the room he lives

in, into that which his horses and cattle inhabit; as these are stabled (at least for the night) both summer and winter, you will easily believe that this fashion does not contribute much to neatness or cleanliness. And indeed as the French houses are all collected in villages, and those villages more irregularly built than you can well conceive, and the streets extremely narrow and encumbered with the dung of their cattle-their villages are in general very dir ty; to this however there are some exceptions, particularly in Flanders, and in the new built villages. Where slate is to be got, the houses are covered with it; where it is not, which is commonly the case, they are thatched with rushes. The thatch is very thick, and extremely well laid, and would certainly make the best of roofs, were it not for the melancholy accidents by fire that it occasions; these are very frequent, and when they do happen it is seldom that a single house in a village escapes. I have seen in Franche-Comte a large extent of country, where the houses were covered with stones which are thin and flat, but not so thin as not to form a very heavy roof, when laid as these were in the manner of tile, and considering that the walls of the houses were made of the same small stone, I think it required some degree of courage to live in such shackling quarries. In the Alps, the houses are covered with shingles, put together without nails, and confined by a pole laid across every second or third layer, and kept down by flat stones. Thro' all that I saw of Piedmont, and the Pays de

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Vaud, the barn and stables were annexed to the house, and in many of them, tho' large and convenient, there was no other chimney than a scuttle of boards above the roof, through which the smoke finds its way as in our wigwams. In the villages, however, chimneys were generally used.

I SHALL annex the plan of a good house, that of the post-master's which I sketched upon Mount Jura, which resembles most of those I saw in the Pays de Vaud. I have also observed in Normandy a mode of building that might be usefully practised when building stone is scarce, and brick dear. The corners are run up with brick in the usual mode. But above and below the windows, and in other parts of the wall, which sustain the least pressure, a thin wall is built with small flat stones, over which again is a course or two of brick, on which the window frame is set, so that the wall is pannel. led with brick and stone; when finished the stone is covered with mortar and some times painted; as the brick projects over the stone and plaister, it never peels or comes off and thus forms a much handsomer front than the brick alone would do, while by this means one third of the brick are saved. But what principally leads me to touch upon the subject of farm houses, is to give you an account of the houses in the neighborhood of Lyons, and through a very extensive country where they have no good building stone; since I think it will afford a very useful hint to farmers who are in similar circumstances.