(1) Whom he met at Calais, as described in his _Sentimental Journey._ (2) The _cantata_ is _The Jolly Beggars,_ from which the motto heading this sketch was taken. _Poosie-Nansie_ was the keeper of a tavern in Mauchline, which was the favorite resort of the lame sailors, maimed soldiers, travelling ballad-singers, and all such loose companions as hang about the skirts of society. The cantata has for its theme the rivalry of a "pigmy scraper with his fiddle" and a strolling tinker for a beggar woman: hence the _maudlin affection._ 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 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 a brick pavement below, like Vulcan on the rocks of Lemnos.(1) As for the lady, he assured us "she took on dreadfully about it." "Did she die?" we inquired, anxiously. There was a cunning twinkle in the old rogue's eye as he responded, "Well, no she did n't. She got married."