mited number of
apt illustrations they have added to the homely poetry of agricultural
life. The only person, belonging to this class, that I ever met, who
possessed an imagination which was continually creative in quaint
images, was a farmer by the name of Knowlton, who had spent fifty years
in forcing some few acres of the rocky soil of Cape Ann to produce
grass, oats, potatoes, and, it may be added, those ugly stone walls
which carefully distinguish, at the cape, one patch of miserable sterile
land from another. He was equal, in quickness of imaginative
illustration, to the whole crowd of clergymen, lawyers, poets, and
artists, who filled the boarding-houses of "Pigeon Cove"; and he was
absolutely inexhaustible in fresh and original imagery. On one hot
summer day, the continuation of fourteen hot summer days, when there was
fear all over Cape Ann that the usual scanty crops would be withered up
by the intense heat, and the prayer for rain was in almost every
farmer's heart, I met Mr. Knowlton, as he was looking philosophically
over one of his own sun-smitten fields of grass. Thinking that I was in
full sympathy with his own feeling at the dolorous prospect before his
eyes, I said, in accosting him, that it was bad weather for the farmers.
He paused for half a minute; and then his mind flashed back on an
incident of his weekly experience,--that of his wife "ironing" the
somewhat damp clothes of the Monday's "washing,"--and he replied: "I see
you've been talking with our farmers, who are too stupid to know what's
for their good. Ye see the spring here was uncommonly rainy, and the
ground became wet and cold; but now, for the last fortnight, _God has
been putting his flat-iron over it_, and 'twill all come out right in
the end."

Thus Mr. Knowlton went on, year after year, speaking poetry without
knowing it, as Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain found he had been speaking
prose all his life without knowing it. But the conception of the sun as
God's flat-iron, smoothing out and warming the moist earth, as a
housewife smooths and warms the yet damp shirts, stockings, and
bed-linen brought into the house from the clothes-lines in the yard, is
an astounding illustration of that "familiar grasp of things divine,"
which obtains in so many of our rustic households. Dante or Chaucer, two
of the greatest poets of the world, would, had they happened to be
"uneducated" men, have seized on just such an image to express their
idea of the