s could enjoy
the noble views from its round and rocky top. To him it was, in noble
symmetry and beauty, the chief mountain of the globe. To stand on it
gave him, as he said, "a feeling of heaven up-h'istedness." He heard
with impatience that Mount Washington was a thousand feet higher, and he
had a childlike incredulity about the surpassing sublimity of the Alps.
Praise of any other elevation he seemed to consider a slight to Mount
Marcy, and did not willingly hear it, any more than a lover hears the
laudation of the beauty of another woman than the one he loves. When he
showed us scenery he loved, it made him melancholy to have us speak of
scenery elsewhere that was finer. And yet there was this delicacy about
him, that he never over-praised what he brought us to see, any more than
one would over-praise a friend of whom he was fond. I remember that when
for the first time, after a toilsome journey through the forest, the
splendors of the Lower Au Sable Pond broke upon our vision,--that
low-lying silver lake, imprisoned by the precipices which it reflected
in its bosom,--he made no outward response to our burst of admiration:
only a quiet gleam of the eye showed the pleasure our appreciation
gave him. As some one said, it was as if his friend had been admired--a
friend about whom he was unwilling to say much himself, but well pleased
to have others praise.

Thus far, we have considered Old Phelps as simply the product of the
Adirondacks; not so much a self-made man (as the doubtful phrase has it)
as a natural growth amid primal forces. But our study is interrupted
by another influence, which complicates the problem, but increases its
interest. No scientific observer, so far as we know, has ever been able
to watch the development of the primitive man, played upon and fashioned
by the hebdomadal iteration of "Greeley's Weekly Tri-bune." Old Phelps
educated by the woods is a fascinating study; educated by the woods
and the Tri-bune, he is a phenomenon. No one at this day can reasonably
conceive exactly what this newspaper was to such a mountain valley as
Keene. If it was not a Providence, it was a Bible. It was no doubt owing
to it that Democrats became as scarce as moose in the Adirondacks. But
it is not of its political aspect that I speak. I suppose that the most
cultivated and best informed portion of the earth's surface--the Western
Reserve of Ohio, as free from conceit as it is from a suspicion that
it lacks anythin