And now for the human being there. The most noticeable peculiarity about the strange old hermit was an enormous wen which hung down from the front part of his neck. This wen was fully as large as a man's head. Long yellow hair hung over his shoulders, and a huge red beard reached to the middle of his breast--
His beard a foot before him, and his hair A yard behind.
His moustache alone showed signs of the scissors: he had there cleared a path through the russet jungle of his beard, that an entrance might be had to the inner man. The eyes that looked out from this thicket of hair had not that hard, dangerous, angry look that experience of such persons had taught me to expect, but they expressed loneliness. He told of the high tides of the month of January in a certain year, when the water rose so as to enter his cabin and ponderous cakes of ice were knocking and grinding against its sides in the night. We talked of fish. He spoke of fyke-nets and drag-nets and warp-lines, and of eel-spearing through the ice. He took especial delight in telling me how the snow in winter was swept away from his door in a clean circle by the broom of some friendly wind. "It is the wind that does it," said he with touching naïveté. It almost seemed to the poor old man's lonely heart like a special favor on the part of the wind, like a tender feeling and relenting on the part of the icy-hearted winter wind for him in his solitude and sadness as he lay there cast out on the desolate shore of the world, deformed and shattered in health--
Gleich einer Leiche Die grollend ausgeworfen das Meer--
"Like a corpse which the bellowing sea has cast out."
Strange life! O utter barrenness of existence! A pipe, a fire, fish, rags and a bed of straw. God pity thee! God pity thee, thou poor stricken deer! Take heart, man, take heart! Be brave, and dash away the bitter tear. Look up from the lowly cabin-door into the solemn night with its golden-burning stars, and even the loosened harp-strings of thy shattered old frame will vibrate and tremble to the eternal melodies that thrill through the mystic All: "God is in his heaven."
Dickens and Hawthorne have each written of canal-life in America, the one in a satirico-humorous way, the other sympathetically. People side with one or the other according as their disposition is active and restless or indolent and epicurean. I fight under the banner of Hawthorne in defence of the canal. The following sketch of one of the old picturesque Pennsylvania canals may be called a vignette, for it is a fragment without definite border or setting. But admirers of Dickens are respectfully requested to note that it is no mere fancy sketch of a poetic mind, but was drawn from Nature, every bit of it.