Sanity itself is a kind of
convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly,
he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way
less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his
own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play;
even that he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his
imagination. His hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be
afraid to say how many bucks--the currency in which he paid his
way: it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was
dear to his heart. The pictorial side of his daily business was
never forgotten. He was even anxious to stand for his picture in
those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once warmed
almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear,
"with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a
crick" (creek, stream).
There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not
care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never
observed scenery. The world, as it appeared to him, was almost
obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground:
Caliban Malvolio. And it seems to me as if, in the persons of
these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly
well represented: the hunter living really in nature; the
clodhopper living merely out of society: the one bent up in every
corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches
it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint
dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life
that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself.
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