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.
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