This sylph-like person had little in common with a monstrous lady whose adventures in the wildernes Phelps was fond of relating.She was built some thing on the plan of the mountains, and her ambition to explore was equal to her size.Phelps and the other guides once succeeded in raising her to the top of Marcy; but the feat of getting a hogshead of molasses up there would have been easier.In attempting to give us an idea of her magnitude tha night, as we sat in the forest camp, Phelps hesitated a moment, while he cast his eye around the woods: "Waal, there ain't no tree!"It is only by recalling fragmentary remarks and incidents that I can put the reader in possession of the peculiarities of my subject; and this involves the wrenching of things out of their natural order and continuity, and introducing them abruptly, an abruptness illustrated by the remark of "Old Man Hoskins" (which Phelps liked to quote), when one day he suddenly slipped down a bank into a thicket, and seated himself in a wasps' nest: "I hain't no business here; but here I be!"The first time we went into camp on the Upper Au Sable Pond, which has been justly celebrated as the most prettily set sheet of water in the region, we were disposed to build our shanty on the south side, so that we could have in full view the Gothics and that loveliest of mountain contours.To our surprise, Old Phelps, whose sentimental weakness for these mountains we knew, opposed this.His favorite camping ground was on the north side,--a pretty site in itself, but with no special view.In order to enjoy the lovely mountains, we should be obliged to row out into the lake: we wanted them always before our eyes,--at sunrise and sunset, and in the blaze of noon.
With deliberate speech, as if weighing our arguments and disposing of them, he replied, "Waal, now, them Gothics ain't the kinder scenery you want ter hog down!"It was on quiet Sundays in the woods, or in talks by the camp-fire, that Phelps came out as the philosopher, and commonly contributed the light of his observations.Unfortunate marriages, and marriages in general, were, on one occasion, the subject of discussion; and a good deal of darkness had been cast on it by various speakers; when Phelps suddenly piped up, from a log where he had sat silent, almost invisible, in the shadow and smoke, "Waal, now, when you've said all there is to be said, marriage is mostly for discipline."Discipline, certainly, the old man had, in one way or another; and years of solitary communing in the forest had given him, perhaps, a childlike insight into spiritual concerns.Whether he had formulated any creed or what faith he had, I never knew.Keene Valley had a reputation of not ripening Christians any more successfully than maize, the season there being short; and on our first visit it was said to contain but one Bible Christian, though I think an accurate census disclosed three.Old Phelps, who sometimes made abrupt remarks in trying situations, was not included in this census; but he was the disciple of supernaturalism in a most charming form.I have heard of his opening his inmost thoughts to a lady, one Sunday, after a noble sermon of Robertson's had been read in the cathedral stillness of the forest.His experience was entirely first-hand, and related with unconsciousness that it was not common to all.There was nothing of the mystic or the sentimentalist, only a vivid realism, in that nearness of God of which he spoke,--"as near some-times as those trees,"--and of the holy voice, that, in a time of inward struggle, had seemed to him to come from the depths of the forest, saying, "Poor soul, I am the way."In later years there was a "revival" in Keene Valley, the result of which was a number of young "converts," whom Phelps seemed to regard as a veteran might raw recruits, and to have his doubts what sort of soldiers they would make.
"Waal, Jimmy," he said to one of them, "you've kindled a pretty good fire with light wood.That's what we do of a dark night in the woods, you know but we do it just so as we can look around and find the solid wood: so now put on your solid wood."In the Sunday Bible classes of the period Phelps was a perpetual anxiety to the others, who followed closely the printed lessons, and beheld with alarm his discursive efforts to get into freer air and light.His remarks were the most refreshing part of the exercises, but were outside of the safe path into which the others thought it necessary to win him from his "speckerlations." The class were one day on the verses concerning "God's word" being "written on the heart," and were keeping close to the shore, under the guidance of "Barnes's Notes," when Old Phelps made a dive to the bottom, and remarked that he had "thought a good deal about the expression, 'God's word written on the heart,' and had been asking himself how that was to be done; and suddenly it occurred to him (having been much interested lately in watching the work of a photographer) that, when a photograph is going to be taken, all that has to be done is to put the object in position, and the sun makes the picture; and so he rather thought that all we had got to do was to put our hearts in place, and God would do the writin'."Phelps's theology, like his science, is first-hand.In the woods, one day, talk ran on the Trinity as being nowhere asserted as a doctrine in the Bible, and some one suggested that the attempt to pack these great and fluent mysteries into one word must always be more or less unsatisfactory."Ye-es," droned Phelps: "I never could see much speckerlation in that expression the Trinity.Why, they'd a good deal better say Legion."The sentiment of the man about nature, or his poetic sensibility, was frequently not to be distinguished from a natural religion, and was always tinged with the devoutness of Wordsworth's verse.Climbing slowly one day up the Balcony,--he was more than usually calm and slow,--he espied an exquisite fragile flower in the crevice of a rock, in a very lonely spot.
