iate any more of it to
himself than he absolutely needs from day to day. He knows from the
beginning that the world could get on without him, and he has never had
any anxiety to leave any result behind him, any legacy for the world to
quarrel over.

He is really an exotic in our New England climate and society, and his
life is perpetually misunderstood by his neighbors, because he shares
none of their uneasiness about getting on in life. He is even called
lazy, good-for-nothing, and "shiftless,"--the final stigma that we put
upon a person who has learned to wait without the exhausting process of
laboring.

I made his acquaintance last summer in the country, and I have not in
a long time been so well pleased with any of our species. He was a man
past middle life, with a large family. He had always been from boyhood
of a contented and placid mind, slow in his movements, slow in his
speech. I think he never cherished a hard feeling toward anybody, nor
envied any one, least of all the rich and prosperous about whom he liked
to talk. Indeed, his talk was a good deal about wealth, especially about
his cousin who had been down South and "got fore-handed" within a few
years. He was genuinely pleased at his relation's good luck, and pointed
him out to me with some pride. But he had no envy of him, and he evinced
no desire to imitate him. I inferred from all his conversation about
"piling it up" (of which he spoke with a gleam of enthusiasm in his
eye), that there were moments when he would like to be rich himself; but
it was evident that he would never make the least effort to be so, and I
doubt if he could even overcome that delicious inertia of mind and body
called laziness, sufficiently to inherit.

Wealth seemed to have a far and peculiar fascination for him, and I
suspect he was a visionary in the midst of his poverty. Yet I suppose he
had--hardly the personal property which the law exempts from execution.
He had lived in a great many towns, moving from one to another with his
growing family, by easy stages, and was always the poorest man in the
town, and lived on the most niggardly of its rocky and bramble-grown
farms, the productiveness of which he reduced to zero in a couple of
seasons by his careful neglect of culture. The fences of his hired
domain always fell into ruins under him, perhaps because he sat on
them so much, and the hovels he occupied rotted down during his placid
residence in them. He moved from desola