l and
healthy man, a despiser of alcohol, satisfied with the moment he lived
in, and giving no consideration to that which would come after. He
had a great contempt for his fellow woodsmen and avoided contact with
them.

The backwoods life, as a rule, I found led to hard drinking, and even
the old settler with whom I had taken quarters, though an excellent
and affectionate head of his family, and in his ordinary life
temperate and hard-working, used at long intervals to break bounds,
and, taking his savings down to the settlement, drink till he could
neither pay for more nor "get it on trust," and then come home
penitent and humiliated. About two weeks after I entered the family,
the old man took me aside and informed me, mysteriously, that he was
going to the settlement for a few days, and begged me to take one of
the boats and come down for him on a fixed day, and he would row the
boat back. I rowed down accordingly, sixteen miles, and found Johnson
at the landing in a state of fading intoxication, money and credit
exhausted as usual, and begging some one to give him a half pint of
rum "to ease up on." He was "all on fire inside of him," and begged
so piteously that I got him a half pint and we started out, he at
the oars and I steering. A copious draught of rum, neat, brought his
saturated brain to overflow, and before we had gone a mile he was so
drunk that I had to guide the oars from behind to insure their taking
the water. Then he broke out into singing, beating time on the gunwale
of the boat with such violence that it menaced capsizing every minute,
and to all my remonstrances he replied by jeering and more uproarious
jollity.

It was no joke, for not to talk of him, too drunk even to hold on to
the boat, I was a poor swimmer, and in the deep and cold lake water
should never have reached the shore swimming, and I found myself
obliged to menace violence. I raised the steering paddle over his head
and assured him with a savageness that reached even his drunken brain,
that I should knock him on the head and pitch him overboard if he did
not keep perfectly quiet. There was imminent danger, for the slight
boat of that region requires to be treated with the care of a bark
canoe, and the menace cowed him so that he quieted down, and watched
me like a whipped dog. I tried to get the bottle away from him, but
his drunken cunning anticipated me and he put it far behind him, now
and then taking a mouthful of rum to kee