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