isy zest about the Scotch preacher: he comes in "stomping"
as we say, he must clear his throat, he must strike his hands together;
he even seems noisy when he unwinds the thick red tippet which he wears
wound many times around his neck. It takes him a long time to unwind it,
and he accomplishes the task with many slow gyrations of his enormous
rough head. When he sits down he takes merely the edge of the chair,
spreads his stout legs apart, sits as straight as a post, and blows his
nose with a noise like the falling of a tree.

His interest in everything is prodigious. When he saw what I was doing
he launched at once upon an account of the methods of axe-helving,
ancient and modern, with true incidents of his childhood.

"Man," he exclaimed, "you've clean forgotten one of the preenciple
refinements of the art. When you chop, which hand do you hold down?"

At the moment, I couldn't have told "to save my life, so we both got up
on our feet and tried.

"It's the right hand down," I decided; "that's natural to me."

"You're a normal right-handed chopper, then," said the Scotch preacher,
"as I was thinking. Now let me instruct you in the art. Being
right-handed, your helve must bow out--so. No first-class chopper uses a
straight handle."

He fell to explaining, with gusto, the mysteries of the bowed handle,
and as I listened I felt a new and peculiar interest in my task This
was a final perfection to be accomplished, the finality of technique!

So we sat with our heads together talking helves and axes, axes with
single blades and axes with double blades, and hand axes and great
choppers' axes, and the science of felling trees, with the true
philosophy of the last chip, and arguments as to the best procedure when
a log begins to "pinch"--until a listener would have thought that the
art of the chopper included the whole philosophy of existence--as indeed
it does, if you look at it in that way. Finally I rushed out and brought
in my old axe-handle, and we set upon it like true artists, with
critical proscription for being a trivial product of machinery.

"Man," exclaimed the preacher, "it has no character. Now your helve
here, being the vision of your brain and work of your hands, will
interpret the thought of your heart."

Before the Scotch preacher had finished his disquisition upon the art of
helve-making and its relations with all other arts, I felt like Peary
discovering the Pole.

In the midst of the discourse,