and idyllic side of life: lively, sturdy, and simple, with nature about
us at once benignant and austere. It is impossible to tell how fresh,
bracing, and inspiring was the climate of this new land. It seemed
to glorify humanity, to make all who breathed it stalwart, and almost
pardonable even in wrong-doing. Roscoe was always received respectfully,
and even cordially, among the salmon-fishers of Sunburst, as among the
mill-men and river-drivers of Viking: not the less so, because he had an
excellent faculty for machinery, and could talk to the people in their
own colloquialisms. He had, besides, though there was little exuberance
in his nature, a gift of dry humour, which did more than anything else,
perhaps, to make his presence among them unrestrained.

His little churches at Viking and Sunburst were always well
attended--often filled to overflowing--and the people gave liberally to
the offertory: and I never knew any clergyman, however holy, who did
not view such a proceeding with a degree of complacency. In the pulpit
Roscoe was almost powerful. His knowledge of the world, his habits of
directness, his eager but not hurried speech, his unconventional but
original statements of things, his occasional literary felicity and
unusual tact, might have made him distinguished in a more cultured
community. Yet there was something to modify all this: an occasional
indefinable sadness, a constant note of pathetic warning. It struck
me that I never had met a man whose words and manner were at times so
charged with pathos; it was artistic in its searching simplicity. There
was some unfathomable fount in his nature which was even beyond any
occurrence of his past; some radical, constitutional sorrow, coupled
with a very strong, practical, and even vigorous nature.

One of his most ardent admirers was a gambler, horse-trader, and
watch-dealer, who sold him a horse, and afterwards came and offered
him thirty dollars, saying that the horse was worth that much less than
Roscoe had paid for it, and protesting that he never could resist the
opportunity of getting the best of a game. He said he did not doubt but
that he would do the same with one of the archangels. He afterwards sold
Roscoe a watch at cost, but confessed to me that the works of the watch
had been smuggled. He said he was so fond of the parson that he felt he
had to give him a chance of good things. It was not uncommon for him to
discourse of Roscoe's quality in the b