or meat. They think that these are more trouble than they are worth, and that it is better to do without. The Americans make no trouble of it. If they can have money or credit, and can get good things, they have them. The English are too selfish to be provident; their boast is that they can do without such a thing, and the habit of doing without is esteemed a fine thing, and causes those who express dissatisfaction to be despised. Thus my countrymen barbarize.
A skiff, last week before daylight, was seen floating on the Ohio, having in it one oar, a suit {318} of shabby English clothes, two watches, and a small keg of whiskey half full. The owner, it was supposed, had tumbled out and was drowned, as have been many English before, on this excursion down the river.
The Rowdies of Kentucky, and in thinly settled parts of Tenessee where they are farmers, frequently decoy travellers, supposed to have money, out of the road, and then shoot them. A traveller, some two or three years since, had taken money near Red Banks,[101] and was waylaid in the above manner by two farmer Rowdies, who shot him and were detected in the act, bearing away the traveller's horse and carriage. One was hanged, and the other nearly whipped to death, and ordered out of the state by the regulators, without time to sell his property. At another time the regulators overtook and shot a murderer, and stuck his head on a pole in Tenessee.
These regulators are self-appointed ministers of justice, to punish or destroy those whom the law cannot touch, such as suspected persons, persons acquitted through false witnesses, or lack of good evidence, but whom public
