A halo of mysterious ghost-seeing, an eternal radiance of poesy, surrounds this copper-lustre pitcher. We found this irradiated pitcher when we went a-spinet-hunting. We found the ghost also, a tall, pale, terrifying apparition, who stealthily entered our room at midnight as we slept in the old Pardon tavern, who mysteriously and quietly carried off our gowns, but who proved in the cold disillusionizing daylight to be our landlady’s daughter, an amateur dressmaker of unbounded ambition and few resources. And our poet! we found him also, a unique and untutored son of the gods, a rare product of New England soil. We prosaically hired this Yankee Walt Whitman to drive us to the Maybee farm—the house which we had been assured held both china and spinet. Our dearly-remembered poet was a tall, wiry New Englander, whose only visible attire was a moth-eaten fur hat, a woollen shirt, a pair of heavy boots, and faded overalls, held in place by a single suspender. He looked too thinly clad for the raw spring weather, but seemed perfectly comfortable and contented in his light clothing. Poet-like, his hair was long. Four little wintry curls blew out from under the old hat. We had been warned that he did not call himself a farmer, but proudly avowed and named himself a poet; and it was hinted that he was a little “luny.” He had begun his rhyming career with the composition of epitaphs for all the village inhabitants, both living and dead; and from thence had advanced to the constant use of rhymes in every-day life and hence had acquired the name of “Rhyming Darius.” He “lisped in numbers for the numbers came;” and proudly did he display his God-given talent to us prosy city folks. He also combined with his vocation as poet the additional talent of employing intensely legal forms of speech; for he had at an early period of his life been a witness in some country trespass case, and had since then always spent a day “in court,” whenever the rare days of idleness of a New England farmer would permit. As a result, he always cross-questioned everyone with whom he had any conversation, and adopted, as far as he could remember, a lawyer’s phraseology and legal terms. He had a wily manner of evading questions, and seldom gave a direct answer; so between questions and answers we held “open court” all the way to the Maybee farm. Our poet also made a strange introduction of the letter “u” into words—which use he evidently regarded as something extremely eloquent and scholarly, but which produced some very astonishing variations in our vernacular speech. He was much excited at the nocturnal abstraction of our gowns and he poured forth a perfect volley of rhymed questions upon the subject to us as he drove, seated sidewise, fixing us “with his glittering eye:”