The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Michigan Man, by Elia W. Peattie

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Title: A Michigan Man
1891

Author: Elia W. Peattie

Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23176]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MICHIGAN MAN ***

Produced by David Widger

A MICHIGAN MAN

By Elia W. Peattie

Copyright, 1891, by J. B. Lippincott & Co

A pine forest is nature's expression of solemnity and solitude.
Sunlight, rivers, cascades, people, music, laughter, or dancing could
not make it gay. With its unceasing reverberations and its eternal
shadows, it is as awful and as holy as a cathedral.

Thirty good fellows working together by day and drinking together by
night can keep up but a moody imitation of jollity. Spend twenty-five
of your forty years, as Luther Dallas did, in this perennial gloom, and
your soul--that which enjoys, aspires, competes--will be drugged as deep
as if you had quaffed the cup of oblivion. Luther Dallas was counted one
of the most experienced axe-men in the northern camps. He could fell
a tree with the swift surety of an executioner, and in revenge for his
many arborai murders the woodland had taken captive his mind, captured
and chained it as Prospero did Ariel. The resounding footsteps of
Progress driven on so mercilessly in this mad age could not reach his
fastness. It did not concern him that men were thinking, investigating,
inventing. His senses responded only to the sonorous music of the woods;
a steadfast wind ringing metallic melody from the pine-tops contented
him as the sound of the sea does the sailor; and dear as the odors of
the ocean to the mariner were the resinous scents of the forest to him.
Like a sailor, too, he had his superstitions. He had a presentiment that
he was to die by one of these trees--that some day, in chopping, the
tree would fall upon and crush him as it did his father the day they
brought him back to the camp on a litter of pine boughs.

One day the gang boss noticed a tree that Dallas had left standing in a
most unwoodman-like manner in the section which was alloted to him.

"What in thunder is that standing there for?" he asked.