In a word Rip was ready to
attend to anybody's business but his own; but as to doing family duty,
and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible.
In fact, he declared it was of no use to work on his farm; it was
the most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole country;
every thing about it went wrong, and would go wrong, in spite of
him. His fences were continually falling to pieces; his cow would
either go astray, or get among the cabbages; weeds were sure to grow
quicker in his fields than anywhere else; the rain always made a point
of setting in just as he had some out-door work to do; so that
though his patrimonial estate had dwindled away under his
management, acre by acre, until there was little more left than a mere
patch of Indian corn and potatoes, yet it was the worst conditioned
farm in the neighborhood.
His children, too, were as ragged and wild as if they belonged to
nobody. His son Rip, an urchin begotten in his own likeness,
promised to inherit the habits, with the old clothes of his father. He
was generally seen trooping like a colt at his mother's heels,
equipped in a pair of his father's cast-off galligaskins, which he had
much ado to hold up with one hand, as a fine lady does her train in
bad weather.
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