Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day’s work.

“I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the hay-cart,” said she, “as Burns did, when he was reaping barley.”

“Burns never made a song in haying-time,” I answered very positively.  “He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet.”

“And on the whole, which of the two characters do you like best?” asked Zenobia.  “For I have an idea that you cannot combine them any better than Burns did.  Ah, I see, in my mind’s eye, what sort of an individual you are to be, two or three years hence.  Grim Silas Foster is your prototype, with his palm of sole-leather, and his joints of rusty iron (which all through summer keep the stiffness of what he calls his winter’s rheumatize), and his brain of—­I don’t know what his brain is made of, unless it be a Savoy cabbage; but yours may be cauliflower, as a rather more delicate variety.  Your physical man will be transmuted into salt beef and fried pork, at the rate, I should imagine, of a pound and a half a day; that being about the average which we find necessary in the kitchen.  You will make your toilet for the day (still like this delightful Silas Foster) by rinsing your fingers and the front part of your face in a little tin pan of water at the doorstep, and teasing your hair with a wooden pocket-comb before a seven-by-nine-inch looking-glass.  Your only pastime will be to smoke some very vile tobacco in the black stump of a pipe.”

“Pray, spare me!” cried I.  “But the pipe is not Silas’s only mode of solacing himself with the weed.”

“Your literature,” continued Zenobia, apparently delighted with her description, “will be the ‘Farmer’s Almanac;’ for I observe our friend Foster never gets so far as the newspaper.  When you happen to sit down, at odd moments, you will fall asleep, and make nasal proclamation of the fact, as he does; and invariably you must be jogged out of a nap, after supper, by the future Mrs. Coverdale, and persuaded to go regularly to bed.  And on Sundays, when you put on a blue coat with brass buttons, you will think of nothing else to do but to go and lounge over the stone walls and rail fences, and stare at the corn growing.  And you will look with a knowing eye at oxen, and will have a tendency to clamber over into pigsties, and feel of the hogs, and give a guess how much they will weigh after you shall have stuck and dressed them.  Already I have noticed you begin to speak through your nose, and with a drawl.  Pray, if you really did make any poetry to-day, let us hear it in that kind of utterance!”

“Coverdale has given up making verses now,” said Hollingsworth, who never had the slightest appreciation of my poetry.  “Just think of him penning a sonnet with a fist like that!  There is at least this good in a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man, and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him.  If a farmer can make poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his nature insists on it; and if that be the case, let him make it, in Heaven’s name!”