It would be very unfair to give the impression that his agreeable social life and the possession of objects and books then in fashion made up the whole or even the largest part of his life. It took such a formidable number of elements to satisfy his huge appetite for life and activity, that it would be difficult to catalog them all. Controversy, for instance; he adored pamphleteering, and was known as one of the leading controversialists of his time. He was a heart-felt Low-Churchman and perhaps the real passion of his passionate life was his hot-blooded detestation of formalism in religious beliefs. Infinitely various, and all headlong, were his attacks on High-Churchism, with its rigid orthodoxy, and its fol-de-rols (as he called them) of salvation by incense and candles and twiddling distinctions between green and blue and yellow stoles.
Indeed this shouldering impatience of formal theological points led him late in life, to disagree vigorously with the majority of his parishioners on several questions of doctrine. Refusing to conform to the strict pattern they wished to impose upon him, he blew up with an explosion, shook the dust of his religious vocation off his feet, and retired to the comfortable old house in Vermont, where he spent his old age, living comfortably on his small savings. He took with him all the possessions he had enjoyed so heartily, his many, many books, his substantial furniture, the excellent oil-portrait which had been painted of his vivid, handsome face in middle-life, his gold-headed cane, his great black-silk clerical robes, and fine ecclesiastical linen. When he died, he had never, so far as I know, slept out of an excellent bed a single night in all his life.
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The other grandfather fared forth at about the same date or a little earlier, and at about the same age; but not in search of well-set dinner-tables nor well-filled libraries, nor the inheritance of culture from past ages. On the contrary, he seems all his life to have been engaged in running away from even the light and sketchy approximation to imprisoning regularity which was shown by the America of that day and the State of his birth. Like an unbroken colt who snorts and wheels and dashes away at the mere sight of some one emerging from the barn with a rope halter, this other farm-boy gave one look at what seemed to him the penitentiary-like pressure of conventional life and ran away with all the speed of what turned out to be a remarkably fleet pair of heels. First, as a lad, he ran away from his perfectly comfortable home, where he had been well cared for, and soundly if plainly educated. Disdaining ... no, more than that, courting hardship, as he always did, he roamed out into the absolute, untrammeled freedom of early frontier life. There he starved and hunted and went in ragged buckskin, and trapped, and moved on, and grew up to a great height and great strength, and was no man’s man to his heart’s content. At some time during this period he acquired, with characteristic casual ease, the profession of surveyor, the only one of the trades or professions at which he was willing even to give a glance. There was plenty of unsurveyed land in the States at that time, and all of it in the new, untracked wilderness which he loved.
He seems always to have despised physical comfort as a clumsy trap laid by life to catch you and hold you fast. None of it for him. He hated the very indoor smell of it, as he did the burdening weight of material possessions. A gun (which like other frontiersmen of that day he passionately and personally loved), an ax (with which he could perform almost any feat), the clothes he stood in, the tools of his wildwoods profession, and the world before him, full, intoxicatingly full of untrodden paths leading into bright enticing danger. Prosperity? A home of his own? Above all, regular work? Never, as long as there were squirrels and deer to shoot and logs to make temporary shelters withal!
His roamings took him into Ohio, the early river and lake settlements of which were at that time horribly marshy and fever-ridden. There he encountered the lure which brings most young adventurers in under a roof and beside a hearth-fire. He fell in love. A pretty Vermont girl was visiting some cousins there and had set up a little millinery shop, where she made and sold the scoop-bonnets of the period. Do you see them, the tall, big-boned surveyor, with his magnetic personality, pungent with the odor of freedom, and the pink-cheeked, white-fingered little amateur milliner?
She went back to Vermont to her family, and he followed her. I have often amused myself by walking around over the roads and paths and fields he must have trod during his wooing, and trying to imagine his impatience of the cribbed and cabined superfluity and conventionality of the Vermont life, which looked so primitive and bare to my other grandfather.
He endured it for some months, till his wooing was successful, and, just after her twenty-first birthday, the gentle, home-loving girl put her hand upon his sinewy arm and followed him out into the wilds. This was in 1838 when the wilds were very wild indeed. My great-uncle, who was her little brother at that time conceived a lifelong admiration and affection for the great, strapping, warm-hearted hero who came to take away his big sister. He used to tell me stories of that impetuous wooing, and of the strange impression left on the deeply-rooted mountain-people by the meteor-like appearance and disappearance of this startling, unreliable, dangerously alive personality, living so immorally free from all the rules and possessions and standards which bore them down to the earth, and to which they so tenaciously clung. My great-uncle always ended these stories of his brother-in-law (whom he never saw but on that occasion) by saying, “He was a talented man, with a powerful personality, who could have done anything he chose.” He also told me, “Our minister said of Albert that he was a wild, free son of Nature.” I take it the minister had had some contact with the romantic-school phraseology so much in fashion at that date.
It was a bitterly hard life which the Vermont girl had chosen, full of extravagant hardships and privations of which she could never have dreamed. They lived here and there, always from hand to mouth, always as far beyond the edge of the settlements as it was possible to take a family of young children, for they had five little girls by the time they had been married a decade. Once or twice her husband made an attempt to enter regular life, to run a store in a frontier settlement, to take an everyday job; but these trials never lasted long, and their old life was taken up, log-cabin after log-cabin, rough clearings in the primeval forest, days when there was nothing but corn-meal in the pantry, long treks in covered wagons to escape from the fever-and-ague which burned and ravaged them; never more possessions than could be drawn by a team of lean horses, ... and always unbroken love and devotion between the two wayfarers. Wherever their caravan halted for a few months was home to the woodsman’s wife, because he was there; his vitality, his free-hearted zest in whatever came to them, bore her along like a tidal wave. And to the end of her days she worshipped the memory of his deep, never-wavering passion for her.