Once in a great while they may be persuaded to perform a day’s labour, but these are rare and painful occasions, always followed by regret and repentance; and when their immediate wants are supplied, they return to the luxurious and indolent repose, which is their second nature, and which they enjoy in a perfection only appreciable by the Neapolitan lazzaroni. When they have thus been compelled to pass a night under a roof, it has been remarked that no human logic can persuade one of them to submit to the abhorred contact of soap and water, or to sleep in a bed, suppose any person could be found willing so to accommodate them. They own no boats, and they neither hire nor borrow them. Such property requires care and trouble, and rowing is laborious. A cow was once the apex of their ambition; but hunger knocks often at their door, and was fatal to poor Brindle. They are not rich enough to buy a gun. The conies, partridges, snapping-tortoises, frogs, squirrels, and such small deer, are their flocks and herds, and the earth produces wild artichokes and other esculent roots. As for their religion, they believe in beef and bread, and go to church, like parasitical insects, as often as they are carried. They believe that the earth is flat, and that the city of New York and the Narrows are its limits. To be hung up in a cage in the sunshine, with licence to scratch themselves, and to be well fed, constitutes their notion of heaven; and the county alms-house, where able-bodied people are constrained to work, is the purgatory of their imagination, or something worse. They think it is better to sleep than to be awake, to lie than to sit, to sit than to stand, to stand than to walk, and to walk than to run. Dancing is to them an incomprehensible abomination. They own no lord, they heed no law. They have nothing, and they want nothing. To cold, heat, rain, &c., they are perfectly indifferent, and their only known evil is pain, which comes to them only in the shape of hunger and intermittent fever. Nerves and delicacy they never heard of. Thus have they ever lived, and thus they will die.