The sight would impress anyone. So far is this disciple of nature away from the ordinary mode of the world that his little cabin, set in the cup-shaped top of a hill, is practically bare of luxuries and the so-called comforts of life. His surroundings are of the rudest, the very rocks and bushes encroaching upon his back door. All about, the crest of the hill encircles him, and shuts out the world. Only the birds of the air venture to invade his retreat from the various sides of the mountain, and there is only a straggling, narrow path, which branches off a dozen times before it takes the true direction. In his house are no decorations but such as can be hung upon the exposed wood. The fireplace is of brick, and quite wide; the floor, rough boards scrubbed white; the ceiling, a rough array of exposed rafters, and his bed a rudely constructed work of the hand. Very few and very simple chairs, a plain table and some shelves for books made the wealth of the retreat and serve for his ordinary use.
“Many people think,” I said, “that your method of living is an ideal example of the way people ought to live.”
“There is nothing remarkable in that. A great many people are very weary of the way they think themselves compelled to live. They are mistaken in believing that the disagreeable things they find themselves doing, are the things they ought to do. A great many take their idea of a proper aim in life from what other people say and do. Consequently, they are unhappy, and an independent existence such as mine strikes them as ideal. As a matter of fact, it is very natural.”
A WORTHY AIM IN LIFE.
“Would you say that to work so as to be able to live like this should be the aim of a young man?”
“By no means. On the contrary, his aim should be to live in such a way as will give his mind the greatest freedom and peace. This can be very often obtained by wanting less of material things and more of intellectual ones. A man who achieved such an aim would be as well off as the most distinguished man in any field. Money-getting is half a mania, and some other ‘getting’ propensities are manias also. The man who gets content comes nearest to being reasonable.”
“I should like,” I said, “to illustrate your point of view from the details of your own life.”
“Students of nature do not, as a rule, have eventful lives. I was born in Roxbury, New York, in 1837. That was a time when conditions were rather primitive. My father was a farmer, and I was raised among the woods and fields. I came from an uncultivated, unreading class of society, and grew up amid surroundings the least calculated to awaken the literary faculty. Yet I have no doubt that daily contact with the woods and fields awakened my interest in the wonders of nature, and gave me a bent toward investigation in that direction.”