Page:The cotton kingdom (Volume 2).djvu/75

 They had been obliged to keep on the track, because the water was up over the adjoining country. Where the wooden causeway had floated off, they had passed through water so deep that it entered the coach body. With our road of to-day, then, he could only express satisfaction; not so with the residents upon it. "Look at 'em!" he would say. "Just look at 'em! What's the use of such people's living? 'Pears to me I'd die if I couldn't live better 'n that. When I get to be representative, I'm going to have a law made that all such kind of men shall be took up by the State and sent to the penitentiary, to make 'em work and earn something to support their families. I pity the women; I haint nuthin agin them; they work hard enough, I know; but the men—I know how 'tis. They just hang around groceries and spend all the money they can get—just go round and live on other people, and play keerds, and only go home to nights; and the poor women, they hev to live how they ken."

"Do you think it's so? It is strange we see no men—only women and children."

"Tell you they're off, gettin' a dinner out o' somebody. Tell you I know it's so. It's the way all these people do. Why there's one poor man I know, that lives in a neighbourhood of poor men, down our way, and he's right industrious, but he can't get rich and he never ken, cause all these other poor men live on him."

"What do you mean? Do they all drop in about dinner time?"

"No, not all on 'em, but some on 'em every day. And they keep borrowin' things of him. He haint spunk enough to insult 'em. If he'd just move into a rich neighborhood and jest be a little sassy, and not keer so much about what folks said of him, he'd get rich; never knew a man that was industrious and sassy in this country that didn't get rich, quick,