him (as upon my mother)
without the slightest warning, and with no discoverable cause.

On my return to the Homestead I went at once to see him. He was sitting
in my mother's wheeled chair, quite helpless, yet cheerful and confident
of ultimate recovery. He had always been a man of dignity, and
singularly abstemious of habit, and these qualities were strongly
accentuated by his sudden helplessness. He was very gentle, very
patient, and the sight of him lying there made speaking very difficult
for me.

When the doctor would permit, he loved to lie in his chair on the porch
of his little cottage where he could look out upon the hills, his eyes
reflecting his beloved landscape like those of a dreaming cage-weary
lion. Inarticulate, like my mother, he was nevertheless the poet, and
never failed to respond--at least with a meaning glance--to any
imaginative word in my discourse.

How much he had meant to me in all the days of my boyhood! As the master
of the threshing machine forty years agone, he had filled my childish
heart with worship. As the swift-footed deer trailer, the patient
bee-hunter, the silent lover of the forest, he had held my regard and
though he had never quite risen to the high place which my Uncle David
occupied in my boyhood's worship, he had always been to me a picturesque
and kindly figure. Year by year I had watched his giant form stoop, and
his black beard wax thin and white, and now, here he sat almost at the
end of his trail, unable to move, yet expressing a kind of elemental
bravery, a philosophic patience which moved me as no words of
lamentation could have done.

Strange malady! He who had never met his match in stark strength could
not now by the exercise of all his will, lift that limp arm from his
side and as I sat beside him I recalled my last sad meeting with Major
Powell, the man who first guided a canoe through the Grand Canon of the
Colorado, and in my mind arose a conception of what these two men, each
in his kind represented in the story of American pioneering. One the
far-famed explorer, the other the unknown rifleman behind the plow. With
William McClintock--with my father, with Major Powell, a whole world, a
splendid and heroic world was passing never to return, and when I took
my uncle's hand in parting I was almost certain that I should never see
him again.

Once he was king of forest men.
To him a snow-capped mountain range
Was but a line, a place of mark,