answer a question or to ask one. She never smiled; the cold,
stony look of her eye never changed; a silent, impassive face, frozen
rigid by some great wrong or sin. We used to look with awe upon the
"still woman," and think of the demoniac of Scripture who had a "dumb
spirit."

(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 r