Is this philosopher contented with what life has brought him?  Speaking of money one day, when we had asked him if he should do differently if he had his life to live over again, he said, “Yes, but not about money.  To have had hours such as I have had in these mountains, and with such men as Dr. Bushnell and Dr. Shaw and Mr. Twichell, and others I could name, is worth all the money the world could give.”  He read character very well, and took in accurately the boy nature.  “Tom” (an irrepressible, rather overdone specimen),—­” Tom’s a nice kind of a boy; but he’s got to come up against a snubbin’-post one of these days.”—­“Boys!” he once said:  “you can’t git boys to take any kinder notice of scenery.  I never yet saw a boy that would look a second time at a sunset.  Now, a girl will some times; but even then it’s instantaneous,—­comes an goes like the sunset.  As for me,” still speaking of scenery, “these mountains about here, that I see every day, are no more to me, in one sense, than a man’s farm is to him.  What mostly interests me now is when I see some new freak or shape in the face of Nature.”

In literature it may be said that Old Phelps prefers the best in the very limited range that has been open to him.  Tennyson is his favorite among poets an affinity explained by the fact that they are both lotos-eaters.  Speaking of a lecture-room talk of Mr. Beecher’s which he had read, he said, “It filled my cup about as full as I callerlate to have it:  there was a good deal of truth in it, and some poetry; waal, and a little spice, too.  We’ve got to have the spice, you know.”  He admired, for different reasons, a lecture by Greeley that he once heard, into which so much knowledge of various kinds was crowded that he said he “made a reg’lar gobble of it.”  He was not without discrimination, which he exercised upon the local preaching when nothing better offered.  Of one sermon he said, “The man began way back at the creation, and just preached right along down; and he didn’t say nothing, after all.  It just seemed to me as if he was tryin’ to git up a kind of a fix-up.”

Old Phelps used words sometimes like algebraic signs, and had a habit of making one do duty for a season together for all occasions.  “Speckerlation” and “callerlation” and “fix-up” are specimens of words that were prolific in expression.  An unusual expression, or an unusual article, would be charactcrized as a “kind of a scientific literary git-up.”

“What is the program for tomorrow?” I once asked him.  “Waal, I callerlate, if they rig up the callerlation they callerlate on, we’ll go to the Boreas.”  Starting out for a day’s tramp in the woods, he would ask whether we wanted to take a “reg’lar walk, or a random scoot,”—­the latter being a plunge into the pathless forest.  When he was on such an expedition, and became entangled in dense brush, and maybe a network of “slash” and swamp, he was like an old wizard, as he looked here and there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or withdrawing from a thicket, and muttering to himself, “There ain’t no speckerlation there.”  And when the way became altogether inscrutable,—­“Waal, this is a reg’lar random scoot of a rigmarole.”  As some one remarked, “The dictionary in his hands is like clay in the hands of the potter.”  “A petrifaction was a kind of a hard-wood chemical git-up.”