August took the chair, ingeniously woven and built of rye straw and hickory splints.  He knew that all this formality and apparent pedantry was superficial.  He and Andrew were bosom friends, and as he had often opened his heart to the master of the castle before, so now he had no difficulty in telling him his troubles, scarcely heeding the appropriate quotations which Andrew made from time to time by way of embellishment.

CHAPTER VI.

THE BACKWOODS PHILOSOPHER.

One reason for Andrew’s love of August Wehle was that he was a German.  Far from sharing in the prejudices of his neighbors against foreigners, Andrew had so thorough a contempt for his neighbors, that he liked anybody who did not belong to his own people.  If a Turk had emigrated to Clark township, Andrew would have fallen in love with him, and built a divan for his special accommodation.  But he loved August also for the sake of his gentle temper and his genuine love for books.  And only August or August’s mother, upon whom Andrew sometimes called, could exorcise his demon of misanthropy, which he had nursed so long that it was now hard to dismiss it.

Andrew Anderson belonged to a class noticed, I doubt not, by every acute observer of provincial life in this country.  In backwoods and out-of-the-way communities literary culture produces marked eccentricities in the life.  Your bookish man at the West has never learned to mark the distinction between the world of ideas and the world of practical life.  Instead of writing poems or romances, he falls to living them, or at least trying to.  Add a disappointment in love, and you will surely throw him into the class of which Anderson was the representative.  For the education one gets from books is sadly one-sided, unless it be balanced by a knowledge of the world.

Andrew Anderson had always been regarded as an oddity.  A man with a good share of ideality and literary taste, placed against the dull background of the society of a Western neighborhood in the former half of the century, would necessarily appear odd.  Had he drifted into communities of more culture, his eccentricity, begotten of a sense of superiority to his surroundings, would have worn away.  Had he been happily married, his oddities would have been softened; but neither of these things happened.  He told August a very different history.  For the confidence of his “Teutonic friend” had awakened in the solitary man a desire to uncover that story which he had kept under lock and key for so many years.

“Ah! my friend,” said he with excitement, “don’t trust the faith of a woman.”  And then rising from his seat he said, “The Backwoods Philosopher warns you.  I pray you give good heed.  I do not know Julia.  She is my niece.  It ill becomes me to doubt her sincerity.  But I know whose daughter she is.  I pray you give good heed, my Teutonic friend. I know whose daughter she is!