The Knickerbocker, Vol. 10, No. 5, November 1837Various
History
The Knickerbocker, Vol. 10, No. 5, November 1837
Various
Periodicals
I found a fine set of fellows here, from all parts of the United
States. Here was a student from the West, with his dark eye and
coal-black hair, and Indian-red cheeks. He was remarkable for his
independence and fearlessness; for his up-and-down dealing, and for
the originality of his figures, and the indifference all western men
feel to weather, domestic comfort, and the elegancies of life. Then
comes the hot-blooded Southerner, contending between his ignorance
and his pride; for the Southerners, (although there are honorable
exceptions,) who come to the North for an education, are too much
gentlemen in their own sense, to be able to handle any thing heavier
than a cigar; though now and then bolstered up to holding a pistol
at some friend they have injured, for the sake of the _éclat_
of the thing. We see enough of this race of spoiled children at
college, where they attempt to lord it over the institution and its
members. They mistake the contempt which permits their folly to pass
unnoticed, for submission.
Here, too, appeared the yankee, with his honest phiz, from the green
mountains of Vermont; with his heart in his hand; telling every
body who will listen to him all his family affairs and domestic
arrangements. Nevertheless he has his points of shrewdness. You are
off your guard by his honest and simple confidence in you: find him
at a nine-pin alley, and he is your man, as he says, ''at can knock
'em down.' Put him down to '_all fours_,' and he will play _game_;
but he does not aspire to whist or billiards; of the latter perhaps
he never heard. But if you would see him in his glory, look at him
at a scrub-race, mounted on one of his father's colts, taken without
leave from the pasture; his hat a little on one side; his neck begirt
with a colored handkerchief, the ends flying; the skirts of his coat
pinned about in front, and he is in his element. A Vermonter is
rarely a drunkard, away from his native state; but to him, and the
smooth-faced, precise inhabitant of Connecticut, we are indebted for
the bad odor in which yankees are held in the middle and southern
states, among the lower order of people, by their sharp bargains, by
biting those who intended to eat them up; for they are not always the
aggressors in a bargain, beyond the latitude of trade law.
The strongest attachments of the Vermonter are for his horses and
cattle, for he was brought up among them, and is taught to regard
them as the sources of profit. Until the age of twenty-one, he is
buckled close to the barn-yard and stables; but at that age, he is
free, and goes from home to seek his fortune in the capacity of
pedlar, clerk, student at medicine or law, or to college, if he has a
bookish turn, but never as a servant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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