Perhaps his most characteristic attitude was sitting on a log, with a short pipe in his mouth.If ever man was formed to sit on a log, it was Old Phelps.He was essentially a contemplative person.Walking on a country road, or anywhere in the "open," was irksome to him.He had a shambling, loose-jointed gait, not unlike that of the bear: his short legs bowed out, as if they had been more in the habit of climbing trees than of walking.On land, if we may use that expression, he was something like a sailor; but, once in the rugged trail or the unmarked route of his native forest, he was a different person, and few pedestrians could compete with him.The vulgar estimate of his contemporaries, that reckoned Old Phelps "lazy," was simply a failure to comprehend the conditions of his being.It is the unjustness of civilization that it sets up uniform and artificial standards for all persons.The primitive man suffers by them much as the contemplative philosopher does, when one happens to arrive in this busy, fussy world.
If the appearance of Old Phelps attracts attention, his voice, when first heard, invariably startles the listener.A small, high-pitched, half-querulous voice, it easily rises into the shrillest falsetto; and it has a quality in it that makes it audible in all the tempests of the forest, or the roar of rapids, like the piping of a boatswain's whistle at sea in a gale.He has a way of letting it rise as his sentence goes on, or when he is opposed in argument, or wishes to mount above other voices in the conversation, until it dominates everything.Heard in the depths of the woods, quavering aloft, it is felt to be as much a part of nature, an original force, as the northwest wind or the scream of the hen-hawk.When he is pottering about the camp-fire, trying to light his pipe with a twig held in the flame, he is apt to begin some philosophical observation in a small, slow, stumbling voice, which seems about to end in defeat; when he puts on some unsuspected force, and the sentence ends in an insistent shriek.Horace Greeley had such a voice, and could regulate it in the same manner.But Phelps's voice is not seldom plaintive, as if touched by the dreamy sadness of the woods themselves.
When Old Mountain Phelps was discovered, he was, as the reader has already guessed, not understood by his contemporaries.His neighbors, farmers in the secluded valley, had many of them grown thrifty and prosperous, cultivating the fertile meadows, and vigorously attacking the timbered mountains; while Phelps, with not much more faculty of acquiring property than the roaming deer, had pursued the even tenor of the life in the forest on which he set out.
They would have been surprised to be told that Old Phelps owned more of what makes the value of the Adirondacks than all of them put together, but it was true.This woodsman, this trapper, this hunter, this fisherman, this sitter on a log, and philosopher, was the real proprietor of the region over which he was ready to guide the stranger.It is true that he had not a monopoly of its geography or its topography (though his knowledge was superior in these respects);there were other trappers, and more deadly hunters, and as intrepid guides: but Old Phelps was the discoverer of the beauties and sublimities of the mountains; and, when city strangers broke into the region, he monopolized the appreciation of these delights and wonders of nature.I suppose that in all that country he alone had noticed the sunsets, and observed the delightful processes of the seasons, taken pleasure in the woods for themselves, and climbed mountains solely for the sake of the prospect.He alone understood what was meant by "scenery." In the eyes of his neighbors, who did not know that he was a poet and a philosopher, I dare say he appeared to be a slack provider, a rather shiftless trapper and fisherman; and his passionate love of the forest and the mountains, if it was noticed, was accounted to him for idleness.When the appreciative tourist arrived, Phelps was ready, as guide, to open to him all the wonders of his possessions; he, for the first time, found an outlet for his enthusiasm, and a response to his own passion.It then became known what manner of man this was who had grown up here in the companionship of forests, mountains, and wild animals; that these scenes had highly developed in him the love of beauty, the aesthetic sense, delicacy of appreciation, refinement of feeling; and that, in his solitary wanderings and musings, the primitive man, self-taught, had evolved for himself a philosophy and a system of things.And it was a sufficient system, so long as it was not disturbed by external skepticism.When the outer world came to him, perhaps he had about as much to give to it as to receive from it; probably more, in his own estimation; for there is no conceit like that of isolation.
Phelps loved his mountains.He was the discoverer of Marcy, and caused the first trail to be cut to its summit, so that others could enjoy the noble views from its round and rocky top.To him it was, in noble symmetry and beauty, the chief mountain of the globe.To stand on it gave him, as he said, "a feeling of heaven up-h'isted-ness." He heard with impatience that Mount Washington was a thousand feet higher, and he had a childlike incredulity about the surpassing sublimity of the Alps.Praise of any other elevation he seemed to consider a slight to Mount Marcy, and did not willingly hear it, any more than a lover hears the laudation of the beauty of another woman than the one he loves.When he showed us scenery he loved, it made him melancholy to have us speak of scenery elsewhere that was finer.