y.
"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. "Ju