With regard to these landscapes however, and to American landscapes in general, it is to be observed, that their beauty is much impaired by the unpicturesque appearance of the angular fences, and of the stiff wooden houses, which have at a little distance a heavy, dull, and gloomy aspect. The stumps of the trees also, on land newly cleared, are most disagreeable objects, wherewith the eye is continually assailed. When trees are felled in America, they are never cut down close to the ground, but the trunks are left standing two or three feet high; for it is found that a woodman can cut down many more in a day, standing with a gentle inclination of the body, than if he were to stoop so as to apply his axe to the bottom of the tree; it does not make any difference either to the farmer, whether the stump is left two or three feet high, or whether it is cut down level with the ground, as in each case it would equally be a hindrance to the plough. These stumps usually decay in the course of seven or eight years; sometimes however sooner, sometimes later, according to the quality of the timber. They never throw up suckers, as stumps of trees would do in England if left in that manner. [Sidenote: TOWNS.] The cultivated lands in this country are mostly parcelled out in small portions; there are no persons here, as on the other side of the mountains, possessing large farms; nor are there any eminently distinguished by their education or knowledge from the rest of their fellow citizens. Poverty also is as much unknown in this country as great wealth. Each man owns the house he lives in and the land which he cultivates, and every one appears to be in a happy state of mediocrity, and unambitious of a more elevated situation than what he himself enjoys. The free inhabitants consist for the most part of Germans, who here maintain the same character as in Pennsylvania and the other states where they have settled. About one sixth of the people, on an average, are slaves, but in some of the counties the proportion is much less; in Rockbridge the slaves do not amount to more than an eleventh, and in Shenandoah County not to more than a twentieth part of the whole. Between Fincastle and the Patowmac there are several towns, as Lexington, Staunton, Newmarket, Woodstock, Winchester, Strasburgh, and some others. These towns all stand on the great road, running north and south behind the Blue Mountains, and which is the high road from the northern states to Kentucky. [Sidenote: LEXINGTON.]