disgusted him.  It was a waste of his time to conduct flippant young men and giddy girls who made a noisy and irreverent lark of the expedition.  And, for their part, they did not appreciate the benefit of being accompanied by a poet and a philosopher.  They neither understood nor valued his special knowledge and his shrewd observations:  they didn’t even like his shrill voice; his quaint talk bored them.  It was true that, at this period, Phelps had lost something of the activity of his youth; and the habit of contemplative sitting on a log and talking increased with the infirmities induced by the hard life of the woodsman.  Perhaps he would rather talk, either about the woods-life or the various problems of existence, than cut wood, or busy himself in the drudgery of the camp.  His critics went so far as to say, “Old Phelps is a fraud.”  They would have said the same of Socrates.  Xantippe, who never appreciated the world in which Socrates lived, thought he was lazy.  Probably Socrates could cook no better than Old Phelps, and no doubt went “gumming” about Athens with very little care of what was in the pot for dinner.

If the summer visitors measured Old Phelps, he also measured them by his own standards.  He used to write out what he called “short-faced descriptions” of his comrades in the woods, which were never so flattering as true.  It was curious to see how the various qualities which are esteemed in society appeared in his eyes, looked at merely in their relation to the limited world he knew, and judged by their adaptation to the primitive life.  It was a much subtler comparison than that of the ordinary guide, who rates his traveler by his ability to endure on a march, to carry a pack, use an oar, hit a mark, or sing a song.  Phelps brought his people to a test of their naturalness and sincerity, tried by contact with the verities of the woods.  If a person failed to appreciate the woods, Phelps had no opinion of him or his culture; and yet, although he was perfectly satisfied with his own philosophy of life, worked out by close observation of nature and study of the Tri-bune, he was always eager for converse with superior minds, with those who had the advantage of travel and much reading, and, above all, with those who had any original “speckerlation.”  Of all the society he was ever permitted to enjoy, I think he prized most that of Dr. Bushnell.  The doctor enjoyed the quaint and first-hand observations of the old woodsman, and Phelps found new worlds open to him in the wide ranges of the doctor’s mind.  They talked by the hour upon all sorts of themes, the growth of the tree, the habits of wild animals, the migration of seeds, the succession of oak and pine, not to mention theology, and the mysteries of the supernatural.