“You are a goin’ over to Deacon Coffin’ses?”
“Yes,” says Josiah.
His face grew sad, and he shook his head in a mournful way.
“A dretful good man the Deacon is.”
Says I, “Sunthin’ in the line of Paradise Lost, or the Course of Time; sunthin’ like Milton or Pollock, haint he?”
Says he “I haint acquainted with the gentlemen you speak of.”
He looked so kinder sharp and curious at me, that I spoke up again, and says I:
“I have got the idee from what I have heerd, that he is sunthin’ like them books I spoke of. Everybody knows they are hefty and respectable, but somehow they don’t take so much comfort a perusin’ ’em as they do in admirin’ ’em at a distance—bein’ wrote in blank verse, they make folks feel sort o’ blank.”
The man didn’t answer me but put on a still more melancholly and deprested look, and says he:
“He haint smiled in more’n thirty years, and haint snickered in goin’ on fifty. It’s curious, how anybody can be so good haint it? You see, I carry passengers back and forth, and the Deacon rode with me about a year ago, and he labored with me powerful about my son Tom, Tom Pitkins! my name is Elam Pitkins.”