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(1) Whom he met at Calais, as described in his *Sentimental Journey.* (2) The *cantata* is *The Jolly Beggars,* from which the motto heading this sketch was taken. *Poosie-Nansie* was the keeper of a tavern in Mauchline, which was the favorite resort of the lame sailors, maimed soldiers, travelling ballad-singers, and all such loose companions as hang about the skirts of society. The cantata has for its theme the rivalry of a “pigmy scraper with his fiddle” and a strolling tinker for a beggar woman: hence the *maudlin affection.*

One–I think I see him now, grim, gaunt, and ghastly, working his slow way up to our door–used to gather herbs by the wayside and called himself doctor. He was bearded like a he-goat, and used to counterfeit lameness; yet, when he supposed himself alone, would travel on lustily, as if walking for a wager. At length, as if in punishment of his deceit, he met with an accident in his rambles and became lame in earnest, hobbling ever after with difficulty on his gnarled crutches. Another used to go stooping, like Bunyan’s pilgrim, under a pack made of an old bed-sacking, stuffed out into most plethoric dimensions, tottering on a pair of small, meagre legs, and peering out with his wild, hairy face from under his burden like a big-bodied spider. That “man with the pack” always inspired me with awe and reverence. Huge, almost sublime, in its tense rotundity, the father of all packs, never laid aside and never opened, what might there not be within it? With what flesh-creeping curiosity I used to walk round about it at a safe distance, half expecting to see its striped covering stirred by the motions of a mysterious life, or that some evil monsters would leap out of it, like robbers from Ali Baba’s jars or armed men from the Trojan horse!

There was another class of peripatetic philosophers–half pedler, half mendicant–who were in the habit of visiting us. One we recollect, a lame, unshaven, sinister-eyed, unwholesome fellow, with his basket of old newspapers and pamphlets, and his tattered blue umbrella, serving rather as a walking-staff than as a protection from the rain. he told us on one occasion, in answer to our inquiring into the cause of his lameness, that when a young man he was employed on the farm of the chief magistrate of a neighboring State; where, as his ill luck would have it, the governor’s handsome daughter fell in love with him. He was caught one day in the young lady’s room by her father; whereupon the irascible old gentleman pitched him unceremoniously out of the window, laming him for life, on a brick pavement below, like Vulcan on the rocks of Lemnos.(1) As for the lady, he assured us “she took on dreadfully about it.” “Did she die?” we inquired, anxiously. There was a cunning twinkle in the old rogue’s eye as he responded, “Well, no she did n’t. She got married.”

(1) It was upon the Isle of Lemnos that Vulcan was flung by Jupiter, according to the myth, for attempting to aid his mother Juno.

Twice a year, usually in the spring and autumn, we were honored with a call from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, pedler and poet, physician and parson,–a Yankee troubadour,– first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering young eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality. He brought with him pins, needles, tape, and cotton-thread for my mother; jack-knives, razors, and soap for my father; and verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts, for the delectation of the younger branches of the family. No love-sick youth could drown himself, no deserted maiden bewail the moon, no rogue mount the gallows, without fitting memorial in Plummer’s verses. Earthquakes, fires, fevers, and shipwrecks he regarded as personal favors from Providence, furnishing the raw material of song and ballad. Welcome to us in our country seclusion, as Autolycus to the clown in “Winter’s Tale,”(1) we listened with infinite satisfaction to his reading of his own verses, or to his ready improvisation upon some domestic incident or topic suggested by his auditors. When once fairly over the difficulties at the outset of a new subject his rhymes flowed freely, “as if he had eaten ballads, and all men’s ears grew to his tunes.” His productions answered, as nearly as I can remember, to Shakespeare’s description of a proper ballad,– “doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant theme sung lamentably.” He was scrupulously conscientious, devout, inclined to theological disquisitions, and withal mighty in Scripture. He was thoroughly independent; flattered nobody, cared for nobody, trusted nobody. When invited to sit down at our dinner-table he invariably took the precaution to place his basket of valuables between his legs for safe keeping. “Never mind they basket, Jonathan,” said my father; “we shan’t steal thy verses.” “I ‘m not sure of that,” returned the suspicious guest. “It is written, ‘Trust ye not in any brother.'”