OLD FENNY'S dead! Gone, at last, the youngest of those rare old men who taught me in my youth: unlettered philosophers who drew me nearer than the learned folk of later years. About the backwoods now degeneracy is painfully marked. Ignorance is still everywhere, but now without the brains to make it respectable. In the days of Uz Gaunt and Miles Overfield it was well worth the while to listen to those to whom lifelong contact with Nature had not been without results. Of late, the power of observing seems to have left the backwoodsman, or the present poor apology for such. Old Fenny was the last of his race. There is no one now living who will ever approach him, though he lives to pass the century year-post. Perhaps the change in the country has to do with it. A child that lives among oaks will have sturdier thought than he who knows nothing but brambles.

I would that I were rich in the wisdom of these unlearned men. Never knowledge so refreshing as that doled out by octogenarians who have grown up with the trees, in the shade of which they passed their declining years.

Here, as I recall it, is what one of these old men said to me just before he died, some twenty years ago: “Gran'daddy cleared off the woods in 1765 and daddy built this house in '93, and I've growed up with the trees that make it shady round the yard. I got so far as to write my name, when a boy, but always did my figurin' in my head. As to readin', well, I'd rather be read to." Again, he remarked, “A roof's handy, but I live out o' doors, and I tell you, I like these old trees. They talk when the wind blows; and it never struck me, as it seems to some folks, that a tree was sort of in ruins when it lost its leaves. Or take the bushes, when they're out o' bloom they're not out o' beauty."

Here was a man worth talking to; one who charmed Lyell when fossil-hunting over in Jersey, and well he might.

But Old Fenny. He did not rank quite so high, but would there were hundreds like him. Put him in a room where the current tattle of the town was the staple of conversation and he was soon asleep; but speak of the meadows, of felling trees, of disastrous freshets, great storms, or a barn-raising, and how his eyes flashed! Every nerve was alert, and every word weighty with earnestness and truth. Yet he was unlearned; sadly so, as he interpreted Nature, in the light of modern science; but, though I knew he was wrong, it was more refreshing to hear him talk than to read any text-book ever printed. His was not misleading ignorance. He held to the moon's influence over the weather, and quoted believingly half the weather-sayings ever heard of; but, with all, there were facts. These you could detach from his inferences and forget the latter straightway, but the others were ever so cleverly put you could not forget them. And, after all, do we not treat the really learned in much the same fashion? We are all so wedded to our own opinions that the inferences of the most prominent men in their line are but too apt to fall upon deaf ears.

As men like Fenny deciphered it, this world was thoroughly intelligible to them. They were all deists, of course, and delved no more deeply into matters spiritual. There was a tendency to spiritualism of the modern kind, because so much was beyond their comprehension, so unsolvable to them, but plain to the learned. This gave them their poetry, and their lives were full of it; but this feeling extended beyond such things to the trivial incidents of every-day life. Fenny wore upon his little finger a rudely-carved bone ring. I once questioned him about it, and, holding it before him, he said, with a strange change of voice, “It's nothin' of itself, but the sunshiny days of one summer come back whenever I look at it."

But let us take a walk with Fenny in the woods. If he did not know a tree botanically he did practically. He laid no claim to why or how the growth was thus and so, but he did know what every tree passed through from the sprouting of the seed to maturity. His knowledge shone with positive splendor when he remarked, “That tree's doted," and yet to all the world it was typical of perfect health. How did he know? Of course I asked him, and then the full discussion of the color of the leaves, their comparative absence from certain limbs, a smoothness or roughness of the bark, a hundred matters others would never see, yet plain as the printed page to him. Yet he was unlearned.

Was it the weather? The moaning of the wind in the pines, the swaying of the meadow-grasses, the rippling of the river's flow, the color of the mill-pond's surface, the quiet or the song of many birds, the hum of bees or flutter of butterflies; these had their meaning, and another "sign"' that he correctly interpreted was the condition of the atmosphere. Would I know if it would rain tomorrow, Fenny could tell. However black the clouds; ay, even if it sprinkled at the time, if he said, “Leave your umbrella behind," I should have done so. Yet he was unlearned.

Alas! Old Fenny's dead, and I must ramble alone or with the scientist. Pardon me, you who have knowledge to explain away the world: Old Fenny's dead, and I have lost much.