rench accent, and knew that he had passed.
I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had
read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to
write thoughts--no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first,
it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the
same time!

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did
not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of
surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever
been entertained before, "No, I like it well enough." It would have
suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To
a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I
sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not
know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as
a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of
stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through
the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he
reminded him of a prince in disguise.

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was
considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which
he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does
to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms
of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and
practical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he do
without factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he
said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this
country afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves
in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm
weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the
convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the
most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the
very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he
wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be
inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of
the creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institutions
better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they
concerned him, he gave the true reason for