Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/135

 which a man of less delicacy or of more arbitrary spirit would have imposed upon others.

In the sense that he held in profound contempt many things which men in general delight in, Mr. Scott may be described as unsocial. He abominated ordinary frivolities in which many persons find mental refreshment. Social life in the usual interpretation of the phrase he regarded as waste of time—even worse, as tending to mental flabbiness. He had not been brought up to understand that even a wise man may frivol not unwisely; and though at periods of his life he mixed more or less in social companies he got little out of it but weariness. So with ordinary amusements. He caied little for the theatre unless by some happy chance there was intellectual merit in the play or power in the performance. Sports he held in contempt. But he liked walking and at one period of his life he got a good deal of pleasure out of horseback riding. Driving was more or less a pleasure to him if he found congenial company, but otherwise it was a bore. Perhaps the keenest pleasure in his life in the sense of occupation, apart from his studies and professional labors, was the clearing of a forest tract at Mount Scott. Here he felt that he was doing constructive work—redeeming the wilderness and preparing it for production. It recalled to him, too, the labors of his youth and a thousand memories connected with them. He once remarked as we stood on the side of Mt. Scott that the odors of burning stumps and brush piles carried him back to his boyhood as nothing else did. "I suppose" he said, "that where it costs me a hundred dollars to clear an acre of this land, its productive value will be less than a mere fraction of that sum. But somehow I like to do it. First or last it's got to be done by somebody and I might just as well get the fun out of it."

The theory that Mr. Scott was unsocial in his nature was one of his own pet self-deceptions—perhaps I would better say affectations. "Yes," he would often remark, "I am by nature