He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal;a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes.His mirth was without alloy.Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods,felling trees,and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction,and a salutation in Canadian French,though he spoke English as well.When I approached him he would suspend his work,and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled,and,peeling off the inner bark,roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked.Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him.Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim,-“By George!I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping;I want no better sport.”Sometimes,when at leisure,he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol,firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked.In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle;and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers;and he said that he “liked to have the little fellers about him.”
In him the animal man chiefly was developed.In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock.I asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night,after working all day;and he answered,with a sincere and serious look,“Gorrappit,I never was tired in my life.”But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant.He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines,by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness,but only to the degree of trust and reverence,and a child is not made a man,but kept a child.When Nature made him,she gave him a strong body and contentment for his portion,and propped him on every side with reverence and reliance,that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child.He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him,more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor.He had got to find him out as you did.He would not play any part.Men paid him wages for work,and so helped to feed and clothe him;but he never exchanged opinions with them.He was so simply and naturally humble-if he can be called humble who never aspires-that humility was no distinct quality in him,nor could he conceive of it.Wiser men were demigods to him.If you told him that such a one was coming,he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing of himself,but take all the responsibility on itself,and let him be forgotten still.He never heard the sound of praise.He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher.Their performances were miracles.When I told him that I wrote considerably,he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I meant,for he could write a remarkably good hand himself.I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by the highway,with the proper French accent,and knew that he had passed.I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts.He said that he had read and written letters for those who could not,but he never tried to write thoughts,-no,he could not,he could not tell what to put first,it would kill him,and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time!
I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed;but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Canadian accent,not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before,“No,I like it well enough.”It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him.To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general;yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before,and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child,whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity.A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap,and whistling to himself,he reminded him of a prince in disguise.
