I want no better sport." Sometimes, when at
leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol,
firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. In the
winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle;
and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes
come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers;
and he said that he "liked to have the little fellers about him."

In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and
contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once
if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he
answered, with a sincere and serious look, "Gorrappit, I never was tired
in my life." But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in
him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that
innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the
aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of
consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a
child is not made a man, but kept a child. When Nature made him, she
gave him a strong body and contentment for his portion, and propped him
on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his
threescore years and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated
that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you
introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out as
you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and
so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with
them. He was so simply and naturally humble--if he can be called humble
who never aspires--that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor
could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told
him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so
grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility
on itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of
praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their
performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably,
he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I
meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself. I sometimes
found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by
the highway, with the proper F