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In the backwoods one cannot choose his neighbors. All are on equal footing. Hence the contagion of crime and shiftlessness spreads to decent families and tends to undermine them. We can understand, then, how it happened in many cases that highland families founded by well-informed and thrifty pioneers deteriorated into illiterate and idle triflers, all run down at heels.
The incident shows, as well as anything, the barrenness and shiftlessness of the region. A horseman with whom we rode in the morning gave us a very low estimate of the trustworthiness of the inhabitants. The valley is wild and very pretty all the way down to Colonel Long's, twelve miles, but the wretched-looking people along the way live in a wretched manner.
He had always been a good hand, but now he became a model no shirking, no shiftlessness and because he was so earnest his master did what he could to help him. Numerous little plans were formulated whereby the slave could make or save a precious dollar.
The wretched smoky fire they maintained was the final triumph and revelation of their utter shiftlessness. With square miles of woodland all about them, they had prepared no billets of suitable size. The man had merely cut down two small trees, lopped off their branches, and dragged them into the room.
But no such exigency could be pleaded to excuse the dirt and discomfort and lack of the commonest provision of outhouse decency at most of these places 'twas mere shiftlessness.
In addition, naturalization should be permitted only after a number of years, during which the immigrant would be in danger of deportation for proved criminality, vicious indulgence, intemperance, shiftlessness, troublesome agitation, and other undesirable traits.
But what the bigotry of Louis XIV and the shiftlessness of Louis XV could not do in nearly a century, was accomplished by this tampering with the currency in a few months. One manufactory after another stopped. At one town, Lodève, five thousand workmen were discharged from the cloth manufactories. Every cause except the right one was assigned for this.
Although it was morning and a brilliant, sunshiny day, the light within was so dim that it was hard to work by; yet with characteristic shiftlessness the window had not been washed for months and diminished still further the little light there was; a mattress in the opposite corner from a shaky cooking gas-burner showed that this room was the entire home.
How dare I leave my barn in confusion, and, by my disorderly doin's, run the risk of my wive's bein' so disgusted with my want of neatness and shiftlessness, as to cause her to get dissatisfied with home and husband, and wander off into paths of dissipation and vice? Oh! I dassent, I dassent, take the resk!
Shiftlessness and poverty reigned in the place. "Nancy, I've made up my mind. The world is done with me, and perhaps I ought to be done with it. But no matter I can wait. I am going to Missouri. I won't stay in this dead country and decay with it. I've had it on my mind sometime.
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