lacked, along with the others, that
commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity
itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on
life plainly, he was unable to see that croquet or poker were in any way
less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his own
profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that
he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his imagination. His
hunting suit, for instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many
bucks--the currency in which he paid his way; it was all befringed,
after the Indian fashion, and it was dear to his heart. The pictorial
side of his daily business was never forgotten. He was even anxious to
stand for his picture in those buckskin, hunting clothes; and I remember
how he once warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing
perceptibly larger, as he planned the composition in which he should
appear, "with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on
a crick" (creek, stream).

There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not care
for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never observed scenery.
The world, as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated by his own
great grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban-Malvolio. And it seems
to me as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two
sides of rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in
nature; the clodhopper living merely out of society; the one bent up in
every corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one
thing keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches
it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint dream,
and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is
truly conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in the fastnesses of
nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's beyond, that a
creature endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of
this crass and earthly vanity. In towns or the busier country sides, he
is roughly reminded of other men's existence; and if he learns no more,
he learns at least to fear contempt. But Irvine had come scathless
through life, conscious only of himself, of his great strength and
intelligence; and in the silence of the universe, to which he did not
listen, dwelling with delight on the sound of his own thoughts.