These bright-eyed woods people were in the last
analysis as inscrutable to us as the squirrels.
We followed our swirling, airy guides down through a trail to another
clearing planted with potatoes. On the farther side of this they
stopped, hand in hand, at the woods' fringe, and awaited us in a
startlingly sudden repose.
"V'la le gran'pere," said they in unison.
At the words a huge gaunt man clad in shirt and jeans arose and
confronted us. Our first impression was of a vast framework stiffened
and shrunken into the peculiar petrifaction of age; our second, of a
Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide,
clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His
movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand
across his forehead, were angular and slow. We knew instinctively the
quality of his work--a deliberate pause, a mighty blow, another pause,
a painful recovery--labour compounded of infinite slow patience, but
wonderfully effective in the week's result. It would go on without
haste, without pause, inevitable as the years slowly closing about the
toiler. His mental processes would be of the same fibre. The apparent
hesitation might seem to waste the precious hours remaining, but in the
end, when the engine started, it would move surely and unswervingly
along the appointed grooves. In his wealth of hair; in his wide eyes,
like the mysterious blanks of a marble statue; in his huge frame,
gnarled and wasted to the strange, impressive, powerful age-quality of
Phidias's old men, he seemed to us to deserve a wreath and a marble
seat with strange inscriptions and the graceful half-draperies of
another time and a group of old Greeks like himself with whom to
exchange slow sentences on the body politic.
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