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.
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