Saturday, July 15th.--Went with B------ yesterday to visit several Irish
shanties, endeavoring to find out who had stolen some rails of a fence.
At the first door at which we knocked (a shanty with an earthen mound
heaped against the wall, two or three feet thick), the inmates were not
up, though it was past eight o'clock. At last a middle-aged woman showed
herself, half dressed, and completing her toilet. Threats were made of
tearing down her house; for she is a lady of very indifferent morals, and
sells rum. Few of these people are connected with the mill-dam,--or, at
least, many are not so, but have intruded themselves into the vacant huts
which were occupied by the mill-dam people last year. In two or three
places hereabouts there is quite a village of these dwellings, with a
clay and board chimney, or oftener an old barrel, smoked and charred with
the fire. Some of their roofs are covered with sods, and appear almost
subterranean. One of the little hamlets stands on both sides of a deep
dell, wooded and bush-grown, with a vista, as it were, into the heart of
a wood in one direction, and to the broad, sunny river in the other:
there was a little rivulet, crossed by a plank, at the bottom of the
dell.
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