Friar, the Admirable Doctor? or read good Sir
Thomas More? What would Sir Thomas have said if he could have thought
that he would be admired by two such people as you and I, in the woods
of America, in the nineteenth century? But you do not want books! Ah! my
brave friend, you are not well. Come into my cell and let us talk. What
grieves you?"

And Andrew took him by the hand with the courtesy of a knight, with the
tenderness of a woman, and with the air of an astrologer, and led him
into the apartment of a monk.

[Illustration: THE SEDILIUM AT THE CASTLE.]

"See!" he said, "I have made a new chair. It is the highest evidence of
my love for my Teutonic friend. You have now a right to this castle. You
shall be perpetually welcome. I said to myself, German scholarship shall
sit there, and the Backwoods Philosopher will sit here. So sit down on
my _sedilium_, and let us hear how this uncivil and inconstant world
treats you. It can not deal worse with you than it has with me. But I
have had my revenge on it! I have been revenged! I have done as I
pleased, and defied the world and all its hollow conventionalities."
These last words were spoken in a tone of misanthropic bitterness common
to Andrew. His love for August was the more intense that it stood upon a
background of general dislike, if not for the world, at least for that
portion of it which most immediately surrounded him.

August took the chair, ingeniously woven and built of rye straw and
hickory splints. He knew that all this formality and apparent pedantry
was superficial. He and Andrew were bosom friends, and as he had often
opened his heart to the master of the castle before, so now he had no
difficulty in telling him his troubles, scarcely heeding the appropriate
quotations which Andrew made from time to time by way of embellishment.

CHAPTER VI.

THE BACKWOODS PHILOSOPHER.

One reason for Andrew's love of August Wehle was that he was a German.
Far from sharing in the prejudices of his neighbors against foreigners,
Andrew had so thorough a contempt for his neighbors, that he liked
anybody who did not belong to his own people. If a Turk had emigrated to
Clark township, Andrew would have fallen in love with him, and built a
divan for his special accommodation. But he loved August also for the
sake of his gentle temper and his genuine love for books. And only
August or August's mother, upon whom Andrew sometimes called, could
exorcise his demon of misa