His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic,in which last he was considerably expert.The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him,which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge,as indeed it does to a considerable extent.I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day,and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light.He had never heard of such things before.Could he do without factories?I asked.He had worn the home-made Vermont gray,he said,and that was good.Could he dispense with tea and coffee?Did this country afford any beverage beside water?He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drunk it,and thought that was better than water in warm weather.When I asked him if he could do without money,he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution,and the very derivation of the word pecunia.If an ox were his property,and he wished to get needles and thread at the store,he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount.He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher,because,in describing them as they concerned him,he gave the true reason for their prevalence,and speculation had not suggested to him any other.At another time,hearing Plato's definition of a man,-a biped without feathers,-and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato's man,he thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way.He would sometimes exclaim,“How I love to talk!By George,I could talk all day!”I asked him once,when I had not seen him for many months,if he had got a new idea this summer.“Good Lord,”said he,“a man that has to work as I do,if he does not forget the ideas he has had,he will do well.May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race;then,by gorry,your mind must be there;you think of weeds.”He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions,if I had made any improvement.One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied with himself,wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without,and some higher motive for living.“Satisfied!”said he;“some men are satisfied with one thing,and some with another.One man,perhaps,if he has got enough,will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table,by George!”Yet I never,by any manoeuvring,could get him to take the spiritual view of things;the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency,such as you might expect an animal to appreciate;and this,practically,is true of most men.If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life,he merely answered,without expressing any regret,that it was too late.Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.
There was a certain positive originality,however slight,to be detected in him,and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion,a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it,and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society.Though he hesitated,and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly,he always had a presentable thought behind.Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life,that,though more promising than a merely learned man's,it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported.He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life,however permanently humble and illiterate,who take their own view always,or do not pretend to see at all;who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be,though they may be dark and muddy.
