was formed to sit on a log, it
was Old Phelps. He was essentially a contemplative person. Walking on
a country road, or anywhere in the "open," was irksome to him. He had
a shambling, loose-jointed gait, not unlike that of the bear: his short
legs bowed out, as if they had been more in the habit of climbing
trees than of walking. On land, if we may use that expression, he was
something like a sailor; but, once in the rugged trail or the unmarked
route of his native forest, he was a different person, and few
pedestrians could compete with him. The vulgar estimate of his
contemporaries, that reckoned Old Phelps "lazy," was simply a failure
to comprehend the conditions of his being. It is the unjustness of
civilization that it sets up uniform and artificial standards for all
persons. The primitive man suffers by them much as the contemplative
philosopher does, when one happens to arrive in this busy, fussy world.

If the appearance of Old Phelps attracts attention, his voice, when
first heard, invariably startles the listener. A small, high-pitched,
half-querulous voice, it easily rises into the shrillest falsetto; and
it has a quality in it that makes it audible in all the tempests of the
forest, or the roar of rapids, like the piping of a boatswain's whistle
at sea in a gale. He has a way of letting it rise as his sentence goes
on, or when he is opposed in argument, or wishes to mount above other
voices in the conversation, until it dominates everything. Heard in the
depths of the woods, quavering aloft, it is felt to be as much a part
of nature, an original force, as the northwest wind or the scream of the
hen-hawk. When he is pottering about the camp-fire, trying to light
his pipe with a twig held in the flame, he is apt to begin some
philosophical observation in a small, slow, stumbling voice, which seems
about to end in defeat; when he puts on some unsuspected force, and the
sentence ends in an insistent shriek. Horace Greeley had such a voice,
and could regulate it in the same manner. But Phelps's voice is not
seldom plaintive, as if touched by the dreamy sadness of the woods
themselves.

When Old Mountain Phelps was discovered, he was, as the reader has
already guessed, not understood by his contemporaries. His neighbors,
farmers in the secluded valley, had many of them grown thrifty and
prosperous, cultivating the fertile meadows, and vigorously attacking
the timbered mountains; while Phelps, with not much more