As the value of the lands and the wealth of the inhabitants decrease, while you journey toward the back country, so also does the intelligence of the people. I never met in my whole life with so many white persons who could neither read nor write, who had never taken a newspaper, who had never travelled fifty miles from home, or who had never been to the house of God, or heard a sentence read from his Holy Word, as I found in a single season in South Carolina. Like the inhabitants of Nineveh, many of them could not discern between the right hand and the left. What wonder then that the hosts of Yankee pedlers, until driven out by the sumptuary laws, fattened upon the land! 'What do you think I gave for that?' asked an ignorant planter in Sumpter district, while pointing to a Connecticut wooden clock which stood upon a shelf in the corner of the room. 'I don't know,' was my answer; 'twenty dollars, or very likely twenty-five!' '_Twenty-five dollars_, stranger!' replied the planter; 'why, what do you mean? Come, guess fair, and I'll tell you _true_!' I answered again, that twenty-five dollars was a high price for such a clock, as I had often seen them sold for a quarter of that sum. The man was astonished. 'Stranger,' said he, 'I gave one hundred and forty-four dollars for that clock, and thought I got it cheap at that! Let me tell you how it was. We had always used sundials hereabout, till twelve or fourteen years ago, when a man came along with clocks to sell. I thought at first I wouldn't buy one, but after haggling about the price for a while, he agreed to take sixteen dollars less than what he asked, for his selling price was one hundred and sixty dollars; and as I had just sold my cotton at thirty-four cents, I concluded to strike the bargain. It's a powerful clock, but I reckon I gave a heap of money for it!' In fact, during those years when the staples of Carolina sold for nearly thrice their intrinsic value, and wealth flowed in an uninterrupted stream through every channel of industry, the plantations of the South became the legitimate plunder of Yankee shrewdness. It was no meeting of Greek with Greek in the contest of wits, but a perfect inrush of shrewd, disciplined tacticians in the art of knavery, upon a stupid and ignorant population. The whole country was flooded with itinerant hawkers. There is scarcely an article in the whole range of home manufactures upon which fortunes were not made during those times of inflated prices of the southern staple products. Through the mountain passes of Buncombe county there flowed a stream of pedlers' carts, wagons, carry-alls, and arks, which inundated the land. Indeed, so great at length became the evil, and so overmatched in the contest of wits were the planters of the uplands, that the legislature passed laws forbidding a Yankee pedler to enter the State.