Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/92



the first man I ever saw sitting still by himself out of doors. What his name was I do not know. I never knew. He was a stranger, who came to visit in our village when I was perhaps ten years old. I had crossed a field, and gone over a low hill (not so low then as now), and there, in the shade of an apple tree, I beheld this stranger, not fishing, nor digging, nor eating an apple, nor picking berries, nor setting snares, but sitting still. It was almost like seeing a ghost. I doubt if I was ever the same boy afterward. Here was a new kind of man. I wondered if he was a poet! Even then I think I had heard that poets sometimes acted strangely, and saw things invisible to others' ken.

I should not have been surprised, I suppose, to have found a man looking at a picture, some "nice," high-colored "chromo,"