Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 11).djvu/221

 *ern country, but here, though there is no visible want, yet is there poverty indeed, and but little or no friendship. No sharing things in common; idleness, poverty, and cheating, are the order and temper of the day."

Mr. Phillips and his wife both looked very shabby, wild, and dirty. He apologized to me for his dishabille, and said, "Sir, if a stranger like you had found me in this plight in England, and I could have seen you coming up to my door, {223} I should have hid myself. Here, however, no shame is felt, but pleasure, at a visit from one of my countrymen, whom I shall be happy to meet again." He keeps an housemaid only, his wife doing nearly all the drudgery herself, although in England, a lady, unaccustomed to soil her hands, or let her feet stray from the parlour carpet.

I had a long and interesting conversation with a young lawyer, the supreme Judge Hart,[74] living in this town, but proscribed and suspended for sending a challenge to three agents of his estates in Kentucky, who, after injuring him, caricatured him, and then refused to fight. The judge says that English labourers know nothing, and are worth nothing in agriculture here; hewing, splitting, clearing, grubbing, and ploughing among roots, being a business which they do not, and wish not, to understand. It is true that they are handy with the spade, and that only. They feel too free to work in earnest, or at all, above two or three days in a week. Every English body here is above work, except the good little farmer, like your friend, John Ingle, and old Phillips, the former of whom is likely