The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

the spiritual faculties so tantalized by the experience of the circles, I decided to pass the next summer in the great primeval forest in the northern part of New York State, k

otherwise than by canoes and light skiffs which could be carried from one sheet of water to another on the backs of the woodsmen, around the cascades, and over tracts of intervening land through virgin forests, without roads, and, to a large extent, without paths. I hoped here to find new subjects for art, spiritual freedom, and a closer contact

of two dollars a week for board and lodging, and passed the whole summer, finding a subject near the cabin, at which I painted assiduously for nearly three months. I passed the whole day in the open air, wore no hat, and only cloth shoes, hoping that thus the spiritual life would have easier access to me. I carried no gun, and held the lives of beast and bird sacre

the men I saw, but animalized-he had drifted back into the condition of his dog, with his higher intellect inert. He had built himself a cabin in the depth of the woods, and there he lived in the most complete isolation from human society he could attain. He interested me greatly, and as he stopped for the night at the cabin where I was living, we had considerable conversation. He cared nothing for books, but enjoyed nature, and only hunted in order to live, respecting the lives of

ous voices, and only the year before he had heard one say that he was wanted at home. He paid no attention to it, thinking it only an illusion, but, after an interval, it was repeated so distinctly that he packed his knapsack, took his dog, and went out with the intention of going home. On the way he met a messenger sent after him, who told him that his brother had met with an accident which disabled him from all work, and begged him to come to his assistance. The voice had come to him at the time of the accident. As a rule, however, the voices seemed vagarious, and he attached no impor

took me aside and informed me, mysteriously, that he was going to the settlement for a few days, and begged me to take one of the boats and come down for him on a fixed day, and he would row the boat back. I rowed down accordingly, sixteen miles, and found Johnson at the landing in a state of fading intoxication, money and credit exhausted as usual, and begging some one to give him a half pint of rum "to ease up on." He was "all on fire inside of him," and begged so piteously

watched me like a whipped dog. I tried to get the bottle away from him, but his drunken cunning anticipated me and he put it far behind him, now and then taking a mouthful of rum to keep down the burning. Thus, he pulling and I guiding the oars, we ran through the lower lake, seven miles, to a "carry," where the boat had to be lifted out and carried over into the river above, around a waterfall. Here I fortunately caught the bottle and sent it down the lake, and we labored on through another lake, three miles, and up a crooked river to another carry into the third lake, on which we lived. He was too dru

r corners, every shed and nook about the premises and were returning hopeless, to wait for daylight to look for him in the lake, when, as I passed the wood-yard (where the fire-wood was stored and chopped), I heard a groan, and, guided by it, found him lying amongst the chips in the torpor of drunken sleep. The poor wife, with my assistance, dragged him home and put him to bed, and when I saw him the next morning I heard over and over again his vows and resolutions, his sermons against drink, his repentance and pledges n

, for subjects. The pure air and the tranquillity of the life, as well as its simplicity, and a certain amount of boating exer

ed of starvation within a short walk of a place of refuge. The houses there were invariably built by the waterways, and the lines of communication were by water, so that there was no necessity for roads. One finds the "runways" or paths made by the deer

es, and, before he could recover it, though only a short distance from his party, had become quite insane, and could only be compelled to return with his companions by force. An artist friend who had sketched on the southern border of the Wilderness told me of a similar experience of an English shoemaker who came to settle in a village on the southern edge of the woods, and who, after a short residence, went out to fish in a stream not far from home. He did not return, and, though protracted search

in all I did,-a delusion which at least served to keep me in absolute self-control under all circumstances. It was probably this which kept me during my wanderings from falling into the panic which constituted t

the stream bed and the course above, if, perchance, there might be better navigation beyond. On one of the digressions I suddenly came on the stream running back on its previous course and parallel to it. Instantly, in the twinkling of an eye, the entire landscape seemed to have changed its bearings,-the sun, which was clear in the sky, it being about three o'clock, shone to me out of the north, and it was impossible to convince myself that my senses deceived me, or accept the fact t

the points of compass was clear to me. By a strong effort of the will, I repressed the growing panic, sat down on a log and covered my face with my hands, and waited, I had no idea how long, but until I felt quite calm; and when I looked out on the landscape again I found the sun in his proper place and the landscape as I had known it. I walked back to my boat without difficulty and went home, and I never lost my head aga

e railway, that of Pittsfield, there was a distance of several miles to the place of rendezvous, which was in the town of Hancock, close to the boundary line between New York and Massachusetts. On leaving the station I inquired the way to Hancock, and was told that as the crow flies, i.e. across an intervening mountain, it was twelve miles without even a footpath; but, by the road around the mountain, twenty, and that, unless I knew the mountain, I could not possibly find my way over it. It was just sunset as I left Pittsfield, and I decided to risk the mountain, and, following a wood road, I climbed the steep declivity, and, going in what seemed to me a nearly direct course, after an hour's walk I recognized a gap in the hill-crest and a distant view with two little lakes reflecting the sky which I had seen the hour before. I had been following a charcoal-burner's road in a circle; daylight had gone, and the mists were coming on heavy as rain, making it impossible to see ten yards before me. There was no recourse, if I was to keep the rendezvous, but to follow the guidance of the inner sense. I determined to obey the monitor, and plunged into the for

ld by the mountain, he exclaimed in amazement, "Why, there is no place by which a white man could come over in broad daylight;" an exaggeration, as I could testify, but it proved that the passage was held to be dangerous to the ordinary foot traveler. The incident in itself has no importance, but the singular feeling under which I made the passage of a trackless mountain, in complete darkness for the most difficult part of the way, in perfect confidence in a mysterious guidance which justified that confidence, was a mental phenomenon worthy of note, the more that it was in keeping with the invariable feeling which had grown up in me from the cogitations of years. As I am telling the story of my life, and the spiritual influences of my early years are an essential part of that life, it cannot

words so clearly spoken that even an incredulous mind could not ignore them. I sat in my boat one evening, out on the lake, watching the effects of the sky between the gaunt pines which, under the prevalence of the west winds, grew up with an easterly inclination of their tops, like that of a man walking, and thus seemed to be marching eastward into the gathering darkness. They gave a sudden impression of a procession, and I heard as distinctly as I ever heard human speech, a voice in the air which said "the procession of the Anakim." Over and over again, as I sat alone by my camp-fire at night, dreaming awake, I have heard a voice from across the lake calling me to come over and fetch it, and one night I rowed my boat in the darkness more than a mile, to find no one. Watchin

my interest in nature and my painting kept me measurably free from this danger, but not from illusions as unaccountable as spiritism, and sometimes more real than the physical facts. I had one evening, when I was lying awake in a troubled state of mind, a vision of a woman's face, utterly unlike anybody I had ever seen, and so beautiful that with the sheer delight of its beauty I re

lusion in the problem. I do not remember the particular character of these perplexities, save that they were generally questions of right and wrong in motive or conduct; but, from the fact that they did not leave a permanent impression, I suppose they were of the quisquilioe which seem at times to perplex the theological world, the stuff that dreams are made of. Up to this time all the doctrines of my early creed held me in bondage: the observance of the Seventh-Day Sabbath, and the exigencies of the letter of the law, which entirely hid the worth of its spirit, were imperative on me, and out of the complication I derived

ain in New York, and entered more formally into the fellowship of the painters of landscape. Being under no necessity of making the occupation pay, I probably profited less than I ought by the regime