The boys continued to ply him with questions, for this was a subject that they had never heard about before, and Sam willingly added more details of the process of training. At length he took a big dollar watch from his pocket and consulted it.
"Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know it was gettin' so late. I'll have to be hurryin' along. Say," he added, a little wistfully, "come up to my house and see me sometime, won't you? I ain't got anything very elegant up there, but I could show you something in the line o' dogs and guns that might interest you."
"Oh, we'd love to, if our folks'll let us," said Ernest. "Where do you live?"
Sam gave them careful directions.
"First and third Tuesdays used to be my days for callers, but nobody came," said he, as he started up the road with Nan. "So now any old day will do—if I'm home."
"How about next Saturday?" asked Ernest.
"Saturday it is," said Sam Bumpus, and with a wave of his hand he vanished around a bend in the road.
Clothes do not make the man, and boys are apt to overlook certain superficial peculiarities and defects which seem more significant to their elders. In Sam Bumpus they saw only a man of good humor and wonderful wisdom, a man whose manner of life was vastly more interesting than that of the common run of people, whose knowledge of the lore of woods and fields, of dogs and hunting, entitled him to a high place in their estimation. They overlooked the externals, the evidences of poverty and shiftlessness, his lack of education, and saw only his native wit and shrewdness, his kinship with the world of nature, and his goodness of heart. They considered it a piece of rare good fortune to have made the acquaintance of so wise and sympathetic a person and they felt indebted to him for permission to visit him, to hear him talk, and to glean from him something of the knowledge that had come to him through experience.
To Sam Bumpus, however, the obligation seemed to be on the other side. The boys did not know it, but Sam Bumpus was a lonely man and craved human companionship. He lived like a hermit in his little shack in the woods and his peculiarities had set him somewhat apart from the world of men. He had no living relatives, and apart from the old lady in the woods road, the inmates of the Poor Farm, and a few other out-of-the-way people with whom he had been able to win his way through his natural generosity and kindness, he had practically no friends but his dogs. He understood dogs better than he understood men, and, to tell the truth, he esteemed them more highly; yet he sometimes hungered for human comradeship. That two frank-hearted, unspoiled boys should seek him out and seem to desire his company gave him a feeling of unaccustomed satisfaction, and he looked forward to their promised visit fully as eagerly as did the boys themselves.
This proposed visit was such an unusual affair that Ernest Whipple considered it advisable to speak to his father about it. Mr. Whipple was reading his paper and made but little comment, but Mrs. Whipple, who was in the room at the time, raised objections.