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 monster 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 the brick pavement below, like Vulcan on the rocks of
Lemnos.
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