VISITORS. 
159 
a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in 
Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. 
When I approached him he would suspend his work, 
and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of 
a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner 
bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed 
and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had 
he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the 
ground with laughter at any thing which made him 
think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees 
he would exclaim, —“ By George ! I can enjoy myself 
well enough here chopping; I want no better sport.” 
Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day 
in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to him¬ 
self at regular intervals as he walked. In the winter 
he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in 
a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the 
chicadees would sometimes come round and alight on 
his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers ; and he 
said that he “ liked to have the little fellers about 
him.” 
In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In 
physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to 
the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was not 
sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he 
answered, with a sincere and serious look, “ Gorrappit, 
I never was tired in my life.” But the intellectual and 
what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as 
in an infant. He had been instructed only in that in¬ 
nocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests 
teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never edu¬ 
cated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the de¬ 
gree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a 
