Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 9).djvu/224

 are ranged round the walls, like so many looms in a weaver's work-shop. In various instances I have seen families living in temporary huts, built of small pieces of decayed timber collected in the woods, laid upon one another in the manner in which sawyers erect piles of timber to be dried. The roofs were covered with bark, and the interstices of the walls left open, so that at a distance I could count the persons within, as if they had been birds in a cage. Near to this place a family lately lived, for several weeks, under an old waggon that was turned upside down. In towns along the banks of the Ohio, a class of people are to be seen, who depend on traffic with travellers, and with the scanty population in the rear of them. Without extravagant profits on the trifling capital employed, they could not subsist. Many of them seem to be immoral, dissipated, and without rural or domestic industry. Few of their lots are cultivated as gardens; and the spinning-wheel, (so far as I have observed,) is not to be seen in their houses.

The evils of slave-keeping are not confined to the parts of the country where involuntary labour {192} exists, but the neighbourhood is infected. Certain kinds of labour are despised as being the work of slaves. Shoe-blacking, and, in some instances, family manufactures, are of this class of labours; and it is thus, that in some of the small towns on the north side of the Ohio, the mechanic and the labourer are to be seen drawing water at the wells; their wives and daughters not condescending to services that are looked upon to be opprobrious. It was for the same reason, that on one occasion, some paupers in a poor's house at Cincinnati refused to carry water for their own use.

Elopements from Kentucky into Indiana are frequent.