if he was tryin' to git up a kind of a fix-up."

Old Phelps used words sometimes like algebraic signs, and had a habit
of making one do duty for a season together for all occasions.
"Speckerlation" and "callerlation" and "fix-up" are specimens of words
that were prolific in expression. An unusual expression, or an unusual
article, would be charactcrized as a "kind of a scientific literary
git-up."

"What is the program for tomorrow?" I once asked him. "Waal, I
callerlate, if they rig up the callerlation they callerlate on, we'll
go to the Boreas." Starting out for a day's tramp in the woods, he would
ask whether we wanted to take a "reg'lar walk, or a random scoot,"--the
latter being a plunge into the pathless forest. When he was on such an
expedition, and became entangled in dense brush, and maybe a network
of "slash" and swamp, he was like an old wizard, as he looked here and
there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or withdrawing from a
thicket, and muttering to himself, "There ain't no speckerlation there."
And when the way became altogether inscrutable,--"Waal, this is a
reg'lar random scoot of a rigmarole." As some one remarked, "The
dictionary in his hands is like clay in the hands of the potter." "A
petrifaction was a kind of a hard-wood chemical git-up."

There is no conceit, we are apt to say, like that born of isolation
from the world, and there are no such conceited people as those who have
lived all their lives in the woods. Phelps was, however, unsophisticated
in his until the advent of strangers into his life, who brought in
literature and various other disturbing influences. I am sorry to say
that the effect has been to take off something of the bloom of his
simplicity, and to elevate him into an oracle. I suppose this is
inevitable as soon as one goes into print; and Phelps has gone into
print in the local papers. He has been bitten with the literary "git
up." Justly regarding most of the Adirondack literature as a "perfect
fizzle," he has himself projected a work, and written much on the
natural history of his region. Long ago he made a large map of the
mountain country; and, until recent surveys, it was the only one that
could lay any claim to accuracy. His history is no doubt original in
form, and unconventional in expression. Like most of the writers of
the seventeenth century, and the court ladies and gentlemen of the
eighteenth century, he is an independent speller. Writing of his work on