“As to the officers, upon signing a parole they might go to Richmond and other adjacent towns to procure themselves quarters. Accordingly a parole was signed, which allowed a circuit of near 100 miles. And after the officers had drawn lots, as three were to remain in the barracks with the men, or at Charlottesville, the principal part of them set off for Richmond, and many of them are at plantations twenty or thirty miles from the barracks. I was quartered, with four other officers of our regiment, at Jones’s Plantation, about twenty miles from the barracks. The face of the country appears an immense forest, interspersed with various plantations, four or five miles distant from each other. On these there is a dwelling house in the centre, with kitchens, smoke-house and outhouses detached, and from the various buildings each plantation has the appearance of a small village. At some little distance from the houses are peach and apple orchards, and scattered over the plantation are the cabins and tobacco houses.” The worm fence was an object of wonder to every foreigner, and yet in a country of abundant timber the most natural thing in the world. Anburey mentions that in the New England settlements (where the holdings were smaller and fences could be made with more particularity) the inhabitants had a saying, “He is making Virginia fences,” used of a man not sober, but able to walk, as it were. Anburey was twice at Richmond, once in the winter and once in the summer of 1779. The neighboring gentlemen were very hospitable, and would not let him leave until he had visited the whole circle. He speaks especially of Warwick and “Tuckahoe.” The proprietor of “Tuckahoe” was threatened with the burning of valuable mills because an English officer had been made welcome. It was an idle threat. On the way to Richmond, by the road through Goochland Courthouse, Anburey met that perennial, the celebrated roundabout directions: “If perchance you meet an inhabitant and enquire your way, his directions are, if possible, more perplexing than the roads themselves, for he tells you to keep the right-hand path, then you’ll come to an old field; you are to cross that, and then you’ll come to the fence of such a one’s plantation; then keep that fence, and you’ll come to a road that has three forks; keep the right-hand fork for about half a mile, and then you’ll come to a creek; after you cross that creek you must turn to the left, and there you’ll come to a tobacco house; after you have passed that you’ll come to another road that forks; keep the right-hand fork, and then you’ll come to Mr. Such-a-One’s ordinary, and he will direct you.” The fact of such directions as these, and the use made of them, are to be explained when we remember that the backwoodsman carries a map in his head, whereas the cockney’s brain is damaged by the use of maps.