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1His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of
2cyclopædia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable
3extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple
4and practical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn the
5home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any
6beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in
7warm weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to
8suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of
9the word pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would
10be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. He could
11defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the
12true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing Plato's
13definition of a man,--a biped without feathers,--and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato's man, he
14thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes exclaim, "How I love to talk!
15By George, I could talk all day!" I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new idea
16this summer. "Good Lord," said he, "a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will
17do well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds."
18He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was
19always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive
20for living. "Satisfied!" said he; "some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps, if he
21has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by George!" Yet I
22never, by any manœuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive
23of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most
24men. If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it was
25too late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues. There was a certain positive originality, however
26slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own
27opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination
28of many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always
29had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more
30promising than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to any thing which can be reported. He suggested that there
31might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view
32always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be
33dark and muddy. Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for
34calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a
35dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from the annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of
36April, when every body is on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though there were some curious specimens among
37my visitors. Half-witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to make them exercise all
38the wit they had, and make their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the theme of our conversation; and so was
39compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the so called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the
40town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much
41difference between the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with
42others I had often seen used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself
43from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth,
44quite superior, or rather inferior, to any thing that is called humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." These
45were his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for another. "I have always
46been so," said he, "from my childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It
47was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I
48have rarely met a fellow-man on such promising ground,--it was so simple and sincere and so true all that he said. And,
49true enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was the
50result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had
51laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages. I had some guests from those
52not reckoned commonly among the town's poor, but who should be; who are among the world's poor, at any rate; guests who
53appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal
54with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be
55not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got it. Objects of charity are
56not guests. Men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them
57from greater and greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who
58had more wits than they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time,
59like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much
60as to say,-- "O Christian, will you send me back?" One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward
61toward the northstar. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and
62unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score
63of them lost in every morning's dew,--and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort
64of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write their
65names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.
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