It showed his brains that he tried to find a reason for this belief. “English oak is good”, he remarked one day sententiously, “but American hickory is tougher still. Reasonable, too, this belief of mine”, he added, “for the last glacial period skinned all the good soil off of New England and made it bitterly hard to get a living and the English who came out for conscience sake were the pick of the Old Country and they were forced for generations to scratch a living out of the poorest kind of soil with the worst climate in the world, and hostile Indians all round to sharpen their combativeness and weed out the weaklings and wastrels.”
There was a certain amount of truth in his contention; but this was the nearest to an original thought I ever heard him express and his intense patriotic fervor moved me to doubt his intelligence.
I was delighted to find that Smith rated him just as I did: “a first-rate lawyer, I believe”, was his judgment, “a sensible, kindly man.”
“A little above middle height”, I interpreted and Smith added smiling, “and considerably above average weight: he would never have done anything notable in literature or thought.”
As the year wore on, Smith’s letters called for me more and more insistently and at length I went to join him in Philadelphia.
NEW EXPERIENCES.
Emerson, Walt Whitman, Bret Harte.