n any of the little souls would thry at an
oath, Larry would break his heart laughing at them; and so, from one
thing to another, they got quite hardened in it, without being any way
checked in wickedness. Things at last drew on to a bad state, entirely.
Larry and Sally were now as ragged as Dives and Lazarus, and their
childher the same. It was no strange sight, in summer, to see the young
ones marching about the street as bare as my hand, with scarce a blessed
stitch upon them that ever was seen, they dirt and ashes to the eyes,
waddling after their uncle Tom's geese and ducks, through the green
sink of rotten water that lay before their own door, just beside the
dunghill: or the bigger ones running after the Squire's laborers, when
bringing home the corn or the hay, wanting to get a ride as they went
back with the empty cars.

"Larry and Sally would never be let into the Squire's kitchen now to eat
or drink, or spend an evening with the sarvints; he might go out and in
to his meal's mate along with the rest of the laborers, but there was
no _grah_ (* goodwill) for him. Sally would go down with her jug to get
some buttermilk, and have to stand among a set of beggars and cotters,
she as ragged and as poor as any of them, for she wouldn't be let into
the kitchen till her turn came, no more nor another, for the sarvints
would turn up their noses with the greatest disdain possible at them
both.

"It was hard to tell whether the inside or the outside of their house
was worse;--within, it would amost turn your stomach to look at it--the
flure was all dirt, for how could it be any other way, when at the end
of every meal the _schrahag_* would be emptied down on it, and the pig,
that was whining and grunting about the door, would brake into the hape
of praty-skins that Sally would there throw down for it. You might reel
Larry's shirt, or make a surveyor's chain of it; for, bad cess (* Bad
success) to me, but I bleeve it would reach from this to the Bath. The
blanket was in tatthers, and, like the shirt, would go round the house:
their straw-beds were stocked with the _black militia_--the childer's
heads were garrisoned with _Scotch greys_, and their heels and heads
ornamented with all description of kibes. There wor only two stools in
all the house, and a hassock of straw for the young child, and one of
the stools wanted a leg, so that it was dangerous for a stranger to sit
down upon it, except he knew of this failing. The f