He Knew Every Foot Of The Pathless Forest; He Knew All Woodcraft, All The Signs Of The Weather, Or, What Is The Same Thing, How To Make A Delphic Prediction About It.

He was fisherman and hunter, and had been the comrade of sportsmen and explorers; and his enthusiasm for the beauty and sublimity of the region, and for its untamable wildness, amounted to a passion.

He loved his profession; and yet it very soon appeared that he exercised it with reluctance for those who had neither ideality, nor love for the woods. Their presence was a profanation amid the scenery he loved. To guide into his private and secret haunts a party that had no appreciation of their loveliness disgusted him. It was a waste of his time to conduct flippant young men and giddy girls who made a noisy and irreverent lark of the expedition. And, for their part, they did not appreciate the benefit of being accompanied by a poet and a philosopher. They neither understood nor valued his special knowledge and his shrewd observations: they didn't even like his shrill voice; his quaint talk bored them. It was true that, at this period, Phelps had lost something of the activity of his youth; and the habit of contemplative sitting on a log and talking increased with the infirmities induced by the hard life of the woodsman. Perhaps he would rather talk, either about the woods-life or the various problems of existence, than cut wood, or busy himself in the drudgery of the camp. His critics went so far as to say, "Old Phelps is a fraud." They would have said the same of Socrates. Xantippe, who never appreciated the world in which Socrates lived, thought he was lazy. Probably Socrates could cook no better than Old Phelps, and no doubt went "gumming" about Athens with very little care of what was in the pot for dinner.

If the summer visitors measured Old Phelps, he also measured them by his own standards. He used to write out what he called "short-faced descriptions" of his comrades in the woods, which were never so flattering as true. It was curious to see how the various qualities which are esteemed in society appeared in his eyes, looked at merely in their relation to the limited world he knew, and judged by their adaptation to the primitive life. It was a much subtler comparison than that of the ordinary guide, who rates his traveler by his ability to endure on a march, to carry a pack, use an oar, hit a mark, or sing a song. Phelps brought his people to a test of their naturalness and sincerity, tried by contact with the verities of the woods. If a person failed to appreciate the woods, Phelps had no opinion of him or his culture; and yet, although he was perfectly satisfied with his own philosophy of life, worked out by close observation of nature and study of the Tri-bune, he was always eager for converse with superior minds, with those who had the advantage of travel and much reading, and, above all, with those who had any original "speckerlation." Of all the society he was ever permitted to enjoy, I think he prized most that of Dr. Bushnell. The doctor enjoyed the quaint and first-hand observations of the old woodsman, and Phelps found new worlds open to him in the wide ranges of the doctor's mind. They talked by the hour upon all sorts of themes, the growth of the tree, the habits of wild animals, the migration of seeds, the succession of oak and pine, not to mention theology, and the mysteries of the supernatural.

I recall the bearing of Old Phelps, when, several years ago, he conducted a party to the summit of Mount Marcy by the way he had "bushed out." This was his mountain, and he had a peculiar sense of ownership in it. In a way, it was holy ground; and he would rather no one should go on it who did not feel its sanctity. Perhaps it was a sense of some divine relation in it that made him always speak of it as "Mercy." To him this ridiculously dubbed Mount Marcy was always "Mount Mercy." By a like effort to soften the personal offensiveness of the nomenclature of this region, he invariably spoke of Dix's Peak, one of the southern peaks of the range, as "Dixie." It was some time since Phelps himself had visited his mountain; and, as he pushed on through the miles of forest, we noticed a kind of eagerness in the old man, as of a lover going to a rendezvous. Along the foot of the mountain flows a clear trout stream, secluded and undisturbed in those awful solitudes, which is the "Mercy Brook" of the old woodsman. That day when he crossed it, in advance of his company, he was heard to say in a low voice, as if greeting some object of which he was shyly fond, "So, little brook, do I meet you once more?" and when we were well up the mountain, and emerged from the last stunted fringe of vegetation upon the rock-bound slope, I saw Old Phelps, who was still foremost, cast himself upon the ground, and heard him cry, with an enthusiasm that was intended for no mortal ear, "I'm with you once again!" His great passion very rarely found expression in any such theatrical burst. The bare summit that day was swept by a fierce, cold wind, and lost in an occasional chilling cloud. Some of the party, exhausted by the climb, and shivering in the rude wind, wanted a fire kindled and a cup of tea made, and thought this the guide's business. Fire and tea were far enough from his thought. He had withdrawn himself quite apart, and wrapped in a ragged blanket, still and silent as the rock he stood on, was gazing out upon the wilderness of peaks.

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