One evening the Scotch preacher came in.  We love him very much, though he sometimes makes us laugh—­perhaps, in part, because he makes us laugh.  Externally he is a sort of human cocoanut, rough, brown, shaggy, but within he has the true milk of human kindness.  Some of his qualities touch greatness.  His youth was spent in stony places where strong winds blew; the trees where he grew bore thorns; the soil where he dug was full of roots.  But the crop was human love.  He possesses that quality, unusual in one bred exclusively in the country, of magnanimity toward the unlike.  In the country we are tempted to throw stones at strange hats!  But to the Scotch preacher every man in one way seems transparent to the soul.  He sees the man himself, not his professions any more than his clothes.  And I never knew anyone who had such an abiding disbelief in the wickedness of the human soul.  Weakness he sees and comforts; wickedness he cannot see.

When he came in I was busy whittling my axe-helve, it being my pleasure at that moment to make long, thin, curly shavings so light that many of them were caught on the hearth and bowled by the draught straight to fiery destruction.

There is a noisy zest about the Scotch preacher:  he comes in “stomping” as we say, he must clear his throat, he must strike his hands together; he even seems noisy when he unwinds the thick red tippet which he wears wound many times around his neck.  It takes him a long time to unwind it, and he accomplishes the task with many slow gyrations of his enormous rough head.  When he sits down he takes merely the edge of the chair, spreads his stout legs apart, sits as straight as a post, and blows his nose with a noise like the falling of a tree.

His interest in everything is prodigious.  When he saw what I was doing he launched at once upon an account of the methods of axe-helving, ancient and modern, with true incidents of his childhood.

“Man,” he exclaimed, “you’ve clean forgotten one of the preenciple refinements of the art.  When you chop, which hand do you hold down?”

At the moment, I couldn’t have told “to save my life, so we both got up on our feet and tried.

“It’s the right hand down,” I decided; “that’s natural to me.”

“You’re a normal right-handed chopper, then,” said the Scotch preacher, “as I was thinking.  Now let me instruct you in the art.  Being right-handed, your helve must bow out—­so.  No first-class chopper uses a straight handle.”

He fell to explaining, with gusto, the mysteries of the bowed handle, and as I listened I felt a new and peculiar interest in my task This was a final perfection to be accomplished, the finality of technique!

So we sat with our heads together talking helves and axes, axes with single blades and axes with double blades, and hand axes and great choppers’ axes, and the science of felling trees, with the true philosophy of the last chip, and arguments as to the best procedure when a log begins to “pinch”—­until a listener would have thought that the art of the chopper included the whole philosophy of existence—­as indeed it does, if you look at it in that way.  Finally I rushed out and brought in my old axe-handle, and we set upon it like true artists, with critical proscription for being a trivial product of machinery.