“Waitin’, you know,” he said when he saw Albert, “tell she gits up.  I was tryin’ to think what I could do to make this house fit fer her to stay in; fer, you see, stranger, they’s no movin’ on tell to-morry, fer though the rain’s stopped, I ’low you can’t git that buggy over afore to-morry mornin’.  But blam’d ef ’ta’n’t too bad fer sech as her to stay in sech a cabin!  I never wanted no better place tell las’ night, but ever sence that creetur crossed the door-sill.  I’ve wished it was a palace of di’monds.  She hadn’t orter live in nothin’ poarer.”

“Where did you come from?” asked Charlton.

“From the Wawbosh.  You see I couldn’t stay.  They treated me bad.  I had a idee.  I wanted to write somethin’ or nother in country talk.  I need to try to write potry in good big dictionary words, but I hadn’t but ’mazin little schoolin’, and lived along of a set of folks that talked jes’ like I do.  But a Scotchman what I worked along of one winter, he read me some potry, writ out by a Mr. Burns, in the sort of bad grammar that a Scotchman talks, you know.  And I says, Ef a Scotchman could write poetry in his sort of bad grammar, why couldn’t a Hoosier jest as well write poetry in the sort of lingo we talk down on the Wawbosh?  I don’t see why.  Do you, now?”

Albert was captivated to find a “child of nature” with such an idea, and he gave it his entire approval.

“Wal, you see, when I got to makin’ varses I found the folks down in Posey Kyounty didn’ take to varses wrote out in their own talk.  They liked the real dictionary po’try, like ‘The boy stood on the burnin’ deck’ and ‘A life on the ocean wave,’ but they made fun of me, and when the boys got a hold of my poortiest varses, and said ’em over and over as they was comin’ from school, and larfed at me, and the gals kinder fooled me, gittin’ me to do some varses fer ther birthdays, and then makin’ fun of ’em, I couldn’ bar it no ways, and so I jist cleaned out and left to git shed of their talk.  But I stuck to my idee all the same.  I made varses in the country talk all the same, and sent ’em to editors, but they couldn’ see nothin’ in ’em.  Writ back that I’d better larn to spell.  When I could a-spelt down any one of ’em the best day they ever seed!”

“I’d like to see some of your verses,” said Albert.

“I thought maybe you mout,” and with that he took out a soiled blue paper on which was written in blue ink some verses.

“Now, you see, I could spell right ef I wanted to, but I noticed that Mr. Burns had writ his Scotch like it was spoke, and so I thought I’d write my country talk by the same rule.”

And the picturesque Inhabitant, standing there in the morning light in his trapper’s wolf-skin cap, from the apex of which the tail of the wolf hung down his back, read aloud the verses which he had written in the Hoosier dialect, or, as he called it, the country talk of the Wawbosh.  In transcribing them, I have inserted one or two apostrophes, for the poet always complained that though he could spell like sixty, he never could mind his stops.