more like the man that
first read or made the speech than the clatter of a nail factory sounds
like a well-delivered speech. Now, the fault was not because Mr. Greeley
did not know how to read as well as almost any man that ever lived, if
not quite: but in his youth he learned to read wrong; and, as it is
ten times harder to unlearn anything than it is to learn it, he, like
thousands of others, could never stop to unlearn it, but carried it on
through his whole life.

Whether a reader would be thanked for reproducing one of Horace
Greeley's lectures as he delivered it is a question that cannot detain
us here; but the teaching that he ought to do so, I think, would please
Mr. Greeley.

The first driblets of professional tourists and summer boarders who
arrived among the Adirondack Mountains a few years ago found Old Phelps
the chief and best guide of the region. Those who were eager to throw
off the usages of civilization, and tramp and camp in the wilderness,
could not but be well satisfied with the aboriginal appearance of this
guide; and when he led off into the woods, axe in hand, and a huge
canvas sack upon his shoulders, they seemed to be following the
Wandering Jew. The contents--of this sack would have furnished a modern
industrial exhibition, provisions cooked and raw, blankets, maple-sugar,
tinware, clothing, pork, Indian meal, flour, coffee, tea, &c. Phelps was
the ideal guide: 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