life of a book-peddler, especially when his character resembled that of
the individual before me. At a high rate was to be reckoned the daily
and hourly enjoyment of such interviews as the present, in which he
seized upon the admiration of a passing stranger, and made him aware
that a man of literary taste, and even of literary achievement, was
travelling the country in a showman's wagon. A more valuable, yet not
infrequent triumph, might be won in his conversation with some elderly
clergyman, long vegetating in a rocky, woody, watery back settlement of
New England, who, as he recruited his library from the peddler's stock
of sermons, would exhort him to seek a college education and become
the first scholar in his class. Sweeter and prouder yet would be his
sensations, when, talking poetry while he sold spelling-books, he
should charm the mind, and haply touch the heart of a fair country
schoolmistress, herself an unhonored poetess, a wearer of blue
stockings which none but himself took pains to look at. But the scene
of his completest glory would be when the wagon had halted for the
night, and his stock of books was transferred to some crowded bar-room.
Then would he recommend to the multifarious company, whether
traveller from the city, or teamster from the hills, or neighboring
squire, or the landlord himself, or his loutish hostler, works suited
to each particular taste and capacity; proving, all the while, by
acute criticism and profound remark, that the lore in his books was
even exceeded by that in his brain.

Thus happily would he traverse the land; sometimes a herald before the
march of Mind; sometimes walking arm in arm with awful Literature; and
reaping everywhere a harvest of real and sensible popularity, which
the secluded bookworms, by whose toil he lived, could never hope for.

"If ever I meddle with literature," thought I, fixing myself in