V.

I said he looked sharply at us two.  He seemed to have a habit of investigating, at least to a certain extent; and he took us in at once, evidently.  A country-parson and his wife.  If I say his pretty wife, I will promise faithfully that it shall be the last time I will refer to myself or my prettiness, the whole way, further than may be absolutely necessary; and it isn’t every woman who will do as much.  For with this man and his belongings I came to have much to do in the course of the next five years.  Little thought I, as I heard him chatting soberly with my husband, and nodding from time to time gravely at me, as If to take me into the conversation,—­little thought I of the shadow he would one day cast over both of our lives!

He showed us his travelling-apparatus for making a cup of tea in ten minutes, toasting bread, and boiling eggs.  It was like a doll’s cooking-stove six inches square, a curious invention, new then, and a wonderful convenience.

“With my tea and this,” said he, “I can go over the United States.  Good bread and sweet butter I can always get at your farm-houses, and I often walk fifty miles together.”

We looked and spoke our New-English astonishment.  In our part of the world nobody walked anywhere.  Everybody, however poor, had a wagon, if not a chaise; and he must be miserable indeed who did not own at least one horse.  Nobody in his sober senses demeaned himself to walking.  Perhaps it was the climate.  Perhaps our fathers instituted the custom, to be as unlike the British as possible,—­as they did of making their houses like lanterns, to show they had no window-tax to pay.

This man’s hearty voice and healthy frame, charged, as it seemed, with fresh air, jollity, and strength, made us think better of walking.  We looked at his six feet of height, his broad chest, and his firmly knit limbs, and fancied how Antaeus gained supernatural vigor from natural contact:  he trod the earth with a loving and free step, as a child approaches and caresses his mother.  So, too, his voice, and the topics he chose in talking, gave us the feeling of out-door existence always connected with him:  of singing-birds, and the breeze of mountain-tops, of great walnut- and chesnut-trees, and children gathering nuts beneath; never of the solemn hush of pines, or twilight, or anything “sough"-ing or whispering:  no, all about him sounded like the free, dashing, rushing water.  So were his bright blue eyes, merry lips, and wind-crimsoned cheeks, interpreters of his nature.  They linked him firmly to the outward.  The man’s soul was made up of joyfulness, strength, and a sort of purposeless activity,—­energy for its own sake.  While his energies harmonized with the right, or were exercised in the pursuit of knowledge, one felt that he would have much power for good.  But suppose his activities to take a wrong direction, all his powers would help him to be and enjoy the wrong.  In either case, his nature would have the same harmonious energy, and the moral part of him would not disturb the balance of his character.  He had no special liking for evil, I am sure; yet, according to all the theories, his intense love of Nature ought to have elevated and refined him far more than it had done.