He seemed to have no desire for companionship, but there was nothing morose or misanthropic in his love of seclusion, and I soon saw that, though he had no care for intellectual growth and no longing for books, he thought a good deal in his own way, and that, mingled with his limited thinking and tranquil emotion before nature, there was a large element of spiritual activity, and this had kept him mentally alive.  He had heard of spiritism, and his own experience led him to acceptance of its reality.  In his solitary life, in the unbroken silence which reigned around him, he heard mysterious voices, and only the year before he had heard one say that he was wanted at home.  He paid no attention to it, thinking it only an illusion, but, after an interval, it was repeated so distinctly that he packed his knapsack, took his dog, and went out with the intention of going home.  On the way he met a messenger sent after him, who told him that his brother had met with an accident which disabled him from all work, and begged him to come to his assistance.  The voice had come to him at the time of the accident.  As a rule, however, the voices seemed vagarious, and he attached no importance to them, except as phenomena which interested him slightly.  There was nothing flighty about him, no indication of monomania—­he reasoned well, but from the point of view of a man who has had only an elementary education, knowing nothing of philosophy; he had no religious crotchets, and apparently thought little or not at all on religious matters—­was, in fine, a natural and healthy man, a despiser of alcohol, satisfied with the moment he lived in, and giving no consideration to that which would come after.  He had a great contempt for his fellow woodsmen and avoided contact with them.

The backwoods life, as a rule, I found led to hard drinking, and even the old settler with whom I had taken quarters, though an excellent and affectionate head of his family, and in his ordinary life temperate and hard-working, used at long intervals to break bounds, and, taking his savings down to the settlement, drink till he could neither pay for more nor “get it on trust,” and then come home penitent and humiliated.  About two weeks after I entered the family, the old man took me aside and informed me, mysteriously, that he was going to the settlement for a few days, and begged me to take one of the boats and come down for him on a fixed day, and he would row the boat back.  I rowed down accordingly, sixteen miles, and found Johnson at the landing in a state of fading intoxication, money and credit exhausted as usual, and begging some one to give him a half pint of rum “to ease up on.”  He was “all on fire inside of him,” and begged so piteously that I got him a half pint and we started out, he at the oars and I steering.  A copious draught of rum, neat, brought his saturated brain to overflow, and before we had gone a mile he was so drunk that I had to guide the oars from behind to insure their taking the water.  Then he broke out into singing, beating time on the gunwale of the boat with such violence that it menaced capsizing every minute, and to all my remonstrances he replied by jeering and more uproarious jollity.