the forest, the spectators
saw revealed the winding valley and its stream. He said quietly,
"There is my golden city." Far below, at their feet, they saw that vast
assemblage of birches and "popples," yellow as gold in the brooding
noonday, and slender spires rising out of the glowing mass. Without
another word, Phelps sat a long time in silent content: it was to him,
as Bunyan says, "a place desirous to be in."

Is this philosopher contented with what life has brought him? Speaking
of money one day, when we had asked him if he should do differently if
he had his life to live over again, he said, "Yes, but not about money.
To have had hours such as I have had in these mountains, and with such
men as Dr. Bushnell and Dr. Shaw and Mr. Twichell, and others I could
name, is worth all the money the world could give." He read
character very well, and took in accurately the boy nature. "Tom" (an
irrepressible, rather overdone specimen),--"Tom's a nice kind of a
boy; but he's got to come up against a snubbin'-post one of these
days."--"Boys!" he once said: "you can't git boys to take any kinder
notice of scenery. I never yet saw a boy that would look a second
time at a sunset. Now, a girl will some times; but even then it's
instantaneous,--comes an goes like the sunset. As for me," still
speaking of scenery, "these mountains about here, that I see every
day, are no more to me, in one sense, than a man's farm is to him. What
mostly interests me now is when I see some new freak or shape in the
face of Nature."

In literature it may be said that Old Phelps prefers the best in the
very limited range that has been open to him. Tennyson is his favorite
among poets an affinity explained by the fact that they are both
lotos-eaters. Speaking of a lecture-room talk of Mr. Beecher's which he
had read, he said, "It filled my cup about as full as I callerlate to
have it: there was a good deal of truth in it, and some poetry; waal,
and a little spice, too. We've got to have the spice, you know." He
admired, for different reasons, a lecture by Greeley that he once heard,
into which so much knowledge of various kinds was crowded that he said
he "made a reg'lar gobble of it." He was not without discrimination,
which he exercised upon the local preaching when nothing better offered.
Of one sermon he said, "The man began way back at the creation, and just
preached right along down; and he didn't say nothing, after all. It just
seemed to me as