then "a piece
farther," then "right up here," then "just ahead," and now threatened to
keep ahead,--I nested myself again in the bottom, and renewed an old
boy-custom by studying the elder Canadian's physiognomy. It was
strangely attractive, and yet strangely impenetrable, a rare out-door
face, clean and firm as naked granite after a rain, healthful as
balsam-firs, and so honestly weather-beaten that one could not help
regarding it as a feature of natural scenery. All out-of-doors was
implied in it, and it belonged as much to the horizon as to the nearest
objects. The eye, with its unceasing, imperturbable search, never an
instant relaxing its intentness, and never seeming to make an effort any
more than the sky in looking blue, asserted this relationship, for by
the same glance it seemed to take in equally the farthest and the
nearest; only over us in the boat it passed always as over vacant space.
Yet any question was answered at once with quiet, willing brevity, not
as if he had been interrupted in his thoughts, or was recalled to a
recognition of our existence, but just as he would turn the tiller in
steering his boat,--while the eye still continued its conversation with
that impersonal, elemental company which he seemed to keep. I found it
out of my power to relate myself to him as an individual. In most faces
you study special character; but in him it was somewhat older and more
primitive,--somewhat which seemed to be rather existence itself than any
special form of it. One felt in him that same world-old secret which
haunts ancient woods, and would have asked him to utter it, were not its
presence the only utterance it can have. Alas, he that speaks must use
English, French, or some language which is partly conventional; and that
pre-Adamite or Saturnian vernacular in which we are all _trying_ to
speak has no verbal sign. Poets, indeed, contrive to catch it, one knows
not how, in the meshes of ordinary language, and only therefore are
poets; but to frame in it any question or answer suited to the wants of
the understanding is a feat beyond man's power. It is true that Mr.
Herbert Spencer, having, by diligent, heroic self-desiccation, got his
mind into the purely adult, dried-beef condition, well freed from all
boy-juices of imagination, has discovered that all Fact in this
universe, which cannot be verbally formulated and made a scientific
dogma, is without significance to man's spirit, however it may be
negativel