Some years ago, one fine day in May, I was helping excavate for the foundation of a new barn. All at once I felt that some one was standing behind me looking at me. I turned around and there was a tall, lithe, slender youth in a faded college cap, blue flannel shirt, ragged trousers and top-boots. My first impression of him was that he was a fellow who slept in his clothes, a plain "Weary," but when he spoke there was a note of self-reliance in his low, well-modulated voice that told me he was no mendicant. Voice is the true index of character.
"My name is Wallace, and I have a note to you from my father," and he began diving into pockets, and finally produced a ragged letter that was nearly worn out through long contact with a perspiring human form divine—or partially so. I seldom make haste about reading letters of introduction, and so I greeted the young man with a word of welcome, and gave him a chance to say something for himself.
He was English, that was very sure—and Oxford English at that. "You see," he began, "I am working just now over on the Hamburg and Buffalo Electric Line, stringing wires. I get three dollars a day because I'm a fairly good climber. I wanted to learn the business, so I just hired out as a laborer, and they gave me the hardest job, thinking to scare me out, but that was what I wanted," and he smiled modestly and showed a set of incisors as fine and strong as a dog's teeth. "I want to remain with you for a week and pay for my board in work," he cautiously continued.
"But about your father, Mr. Wallace—do I know him?"
"I think so; he has written you several letters—Alfred Russel Wallace!"
You could have knocked me down with a lady's-slipper. I opened the letter and unmistakably it was from the great scientist, "introducing my baby boy."
I never met Alfred Russel Wallace, but I know if I should, I would find him very gentle, kindly and simple in all his ways—as really great men ever are. He would not talk to me in Latin nor throw off technical phrases about great nothings, and I would feel just as much at home with him as I did with Ol' John Burroughs the last time I saw him, leaning up against a country railroad-station in shirt-sleeves, chewing a straw, exchanging salutes with the engineer on a West Shore jerkwater. "S' long, John!" called the going one as he leaned out of the cab-window. "S' long, Bill, and good luck to you," was the cheery answer.
But still, all of us have moments when we think of the world's most famous ones as being surely eight feet tall, and having voices like fog-horns.
"I can do most any kind of hard work, you know"—I was aroused from my little mental excursion, and noticed that my visitor had hair of a light yellow like a Swede from Hennepin County, Minnesota, and that his hair was three shades lighter than his bronzed face. "I can do any kind of work, you know, and if you will just loan me that pick"—and I handed him the pickax.
Young Wallace remained with us for a week, asking for nothing, doing everything, even to helping the girls wash dishes. That he was the son of a great man, no one would have ever learned from his own lips. In fact, I am not sure that he was impressed with his father's excellence, but I saw there was a tender bond between them, for he haunted the post-office, morning, noon and night, looking for a letter from his father. When it came he was as happy as a woodchuck. He showed me the letter: it was nine finely written pages.