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Nevertheless, I gladly embraced the opportunity to remain on board for a time. The brig would probably be several weeks in port, and my future course could be guided by circumstances. The moral condition of New Orleans at this period the year 1816-1817 was deplorable. For vice and immorality, it doubtless bore away the palm from every city in Christendom or heathen lands.

And now, reader, we have run through all the ten categories of my condition as it stood about 1816-1817, up to the middle of which latter year I judge myself to have been a happy man. But now farewell, a long farewell to happiness, winter or summer! farewell to smiles and laughter! farewell to peace of mind! farewell to hope and to tranquil dreams, and to the blessed consolations of sleep!

Water for irrigation and domestic purposes was brought in cement pipes, made and laid under the direction of the padres, from Salsperde Creek, three miles away. But other misfortunes were in store for these unlucky people. During a drought in the winter of 1816-1817, hundreds of sheep perished for lack of feed, and in 1818 nearly all the neophytes' houses were destroyed by fire.

Vagrants, or little better than vagrants, were Thomas Lincoln and his family making their way to Indiana. For a year after they arrived they were squatters, their home an "open-faced camp," that is, a shanty with one wall missing, and instead of chimney, a fire built on the open side. In that mere pretense of a house, Nancy Lincoln and her children spent the winter of 1816-1817.