Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/64

 on when they're most too fat to snore"; "that man is mean enough to steal acorns from a blind hog"; "the coppers ain't all tails"; "pop'lar as a hen with one chicken"; "quicker'n greased lightnin'"; "a hen's time ain't much"; "handy as a pocket in a shirt"; "he's a whole team and the dog under the wagon"; "so thievish they had to take in their stone walls at night"; "so black that charcoal made a chalk mark on him"; "painted so like marble that it sank in water"—the above are all Yankeeisms of approved lineage and illustrate a characteristic type of Yankee humor. The example below is of a rarer sort. "Pretty heavy thunder you have here," said the English Captain Basil Hall to a lounger in front of a Massachusetts tavern. "Waal, we do," came the drawling reply, "considerin' the number of the inhabitants."

About the time that Yankees began to emigrate to Wisconsin a talented French writer, Michel Chevalier, gave the world a brilliant and on the whole favorable characterization of them. "The Yankee," he says, "is reserved, cautious, distrustful; he is thoughtful and pensive, but equable; his manners are without grace, modest but dignified, cold, and often unprepossessing; he is narrow in his ideas, but practical, and possessing the idea of the proper, he never rises to the grand. He has nothing chivalric about him and yet he is adventurous, and he loves a roving life. His imagination is active and original, producing, however, not poetry but drollery. The Yankee is the laborious ant; he is industrious and sober and, on the sterile soil of New England, niggardly; transplanted to the promised land in the west he continues moderate in his habits, but less inclined to count the cents. In New England he has a large share of prudence, but once thrown into the midst of the treasures of the west he becomes a speculator, a gambler even, although he has a great horror of cards, dice, and all games of chance and even of skill