know how he did it. To this
day, though he has been dead one hundred years, he is spoken of in the
region where he lived, as Wonderful Walker. By this epithet, also, he is
spoken of by the poet Wordsworth, in the "Excursion:"--

"And him, the Wonderful,
Our simple shepherds, speaking from the heart,
Deservedly have styled."

He lived and died in the lake country of England, near the residence of
Wordsworth, who has embalmed him in verse, and described him in prose.
Robert Walker, the youngest of twelve children, the son of a yeoman of
small estate, was bred a scholar because he was of a frame too delicate,
as his father thought, to earn his livelihood by bodily labor. He
struggled into a competent knowledge of the classics and divinity,
gained in strength as he advanced towards manhood, and by the time he
was ordained was as vigorous and alert as most men of his age.

After his ordination, he had his choice of two curacies of the same
revenue, namely, five pounds a year--twenty-five dollars. One of these,
Seathwaite by name, too insignificant a place to figure upon a map, or
even in the "Gazetteer," was situated in his native valley, in the
church of which he had gone to school in his childhood. He chose
Seathwaite, but not for that reason. He was in love; he wished to marry;
and this parish had a small parsonage attached to it, with a garden of
three quarters of an acre. The person to whom he was engaged was a
comely and intelligent domestic servant such as then could frequently be
found in the sequestered parts of England. She had saved, it appears,
from her wages the handsome sum of forty pounds. Thus provided, he
married, and entered upon his curacy in his twenty-sixth year, and set
up housekeeping in his little parsonage.

Every one knows what kind of families poor clergymen are apt to have.
Wonderful Walker had one of that kind. About every two years, or less, a
child arrived; and heartily welcome they all were, and deeply the
parents mourned the loss of one that died. In the course of a few years,
eight bouncing girls and boys filled his little house; and the question
recurs with force: How did he support them all? From Queen Anne's
bounty, and other sources, his income was increased to the sum mentioned
above, twenty-four pounds. That for a beginning. Now for the rest.

In the first place, he was the lawyer of his parish, as well as its
notary, conveyancer, appraiser, and arbitrator. He dr