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 the brick pavement below, like Vulcan on the rocks of
Lemnos. As for the lady, he assured us "she took on dreadfully about
it." "Did she die?" we inquired anxiously. There was a cun-ing
twinkle in the old rogue's eye as he responded, "Well, no, she did n't.
She got married."

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 lovesick 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, we listened with
infinite satisfaction to his readings 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