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"It is him!" gasped Mrs. Susan Sharpe. "Oh, good gracious!" "Good-day to you, my strapping, lass. How do you find yourself this blessed morning?" Susan Sharpe knew there were listening ears and looking eyes in the kitchen, and for their benefit she retorted: "It's no business of yours how I am! Be off with you! We don't allow no vagrants here!" "But I ain't a vagrant, my duck o' diamonds.
As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred years ago, like the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre, symbolical spirit which gives to all words a mien which is now mournful, now menacing. One feels in it the wild and ancient sadness of those vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs of their own, some of which have come down to us.
Here were the "picturesque costumes!" This was the "gallant spectacle!" Tatterdemalion vagrants cheap braggadocio "Arabian mares" spined and necked like the ichthyosaurus in the museum, and humped and cornered like a dromedary!
Yet the variety was considerable: hardy and danger-loving pioneers fulfilling the requirements of romance; shiftless vagrants curiously combining utter inefficiency with a sort of bastard contempt for hardship; ruffians who could only offset against every brutal vice an ignoble physical courage; intelligent men whose observant eyes ranged over the whole region in a shrewd search after enterprise and profit; a few educated men, decent in apparel and bearing, useful in legislation and in preventing the ideal from becoming altogether vulgarized and debased; and others whose energy was chiefly of the tongue, the class imbued with a taste for small politics and the public business.
A similar measure would do more to stop negro vagrancy in the south than the severest penal laws. In every country the number of vagrants stands in proportion to the number of people who have no permanent local interests, unless augmented by exceptional cases, such as war or famine. Contracts. Freedmen frequently show great disinclination to make contracts with their former masters.
But he only wrapped his furs still closer and passed on, saying sternly, "I have nothing for vagrants. Go to work, young man." A woman poorly clad in widow's weeds passed at that moment, and, as the beggar fell back from the rich man's path, she dropped a bit of silver in his hand, saying with true womanly compassion, "Heaven help you! it is all I have to give."
There are a few among the population, like vagrants and the idle rich, who are parasites, but even they sustain relations to others that require a certain sort of effort. Activity seems fundamental. It needs but a hasty survey to show how general it is.
Whoever distinguished himself by diligent service, by chastity, by filial piety, or by loyalty, could count on honourable notice. Sadanobu, acting on the advice of the judicial officials, dealt with this evil by establishing a house of correction on Ishikawa Island. There homeless vagrants were detained and provided with work, those ignorant of any handicraft being employed as labourers.
At Geog Tapa, in the absence of the Malis, he ordered an old man, who formerly held that office, to summon the people before him. Only a few vagrants obeyed, and these he commanded to break up the schools, and prevent preaching in the church.
But American vagrants, with no thoughts save of gold-digging, and an overweening illiterate jargon for speech, had long ceased to interest this priest, even in his starvation for company and talk from the outside world; and therefore after the intoning he sat with his homesick thoughts unchanged, to draw both pain and enjoyment from the music that he had set to the Dixit Dominus.
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