The poorhouse was not an imposing structure, but it could boast of antiquity, as it had been built long, long ago for the purpose for which it was now used.
It was not difficult for Johanson to locate the poorhouse poet. His room, like the other two, opened directly on the vestibule. On his own door he had been allowed to paint his name and publish his chosen occupation:—
"I take my bag,
My legs my nag,
And never fail
To fetch the mail."
So ran the poor rhymes, yet the mad poet had not given himself his full meed of praise. No storm was too wild, no cold too severe, no snow too deep for the faithful mail-carrier to make his rounds. Rather than give up the leathern bag entrusted to him to teasing country boys or desperate highwayman, he would have died in its defence.
The principle of growth had exerted its power eccentrically with the poorhouse poet. His legs and neck were elongated out of all proportion to the rest of his body. His small, pale face was raised unnaturally high in the air, as if he had suffered decapitation and his head had been posted as an assurance that offended law had been avenged. Unconscious of his own peculiarities, the persistent rhymer went about pleased with himself and all the world. Now he was particularly happy, for he considered himself a kind of presiding officer at the poorhouse, and as such the proper person to show the premises to curious strangers, or to formally install new inmates. On the entrance of Johanson with the pastor's permit, the poet immediately took the odd-looking pauper in hand, to make him at home in the establishment.
He knocked at the small room opposite the main entrance, and a shrill voice having shouted, "Come in!" the visitors opened the door.
"I bring a new-comer,
Our guest for the summer!
He's Johanson, he;
Gull Hansdotter, she."
So presented, Johanson bowed to the little old woman, who stood up beside the chair in which she had been sitting, and deigned to bend her knees for a courtesy just sufficiently to bring her short skirts possibly one inch nearer the floor. Her stiff demeanour, however, changed suddenly as she darted to a corner and produced a bit of rag carpet, on which she requested the visitors to stand, as her room had been freshly scoured for Sunday.
"Scour Sunday,
Scour Monday,
Scour every day,
That's her way,"
said the poet, retiring precipitately with his companion. The poet had described the absorbing pursuit of his fellow-lodger. Chairs, table, and floor in that little room were subject to such rasping purifications, that if there had ever been paint on any of them, it was a thing of the far past, while an ashy whiteness and a general smell of dampness were the abiding peculiarities of the apartment. The eyes of the owner had become possessed of a microscopic power of discovering the minutest speck that might have been envied by any scientific observer of insect life.