After emerging from the Imperial flood at the last chapter, I fell headlong into Vasari's _Lives of the Painters_, in nine volumes. Then I read Motley's _Netherlands_ and the _Rise of the Dutch Republic_, always terrible and picturesque since I had read it as a boy of eleven.
At the sawmill there was but one man with whom I could talk on any matters of intellectual interest. He was a big man from Michigan and ran the shingle saw. We often discussed what I had lately read, and went away from discussion to argument concerning philosophy and theology. He was a most lovable person; as keen as a sharpened sawtooth, and a polemic but courteous atheist. His greatest sorrow in life was that his mother, a Middle State woman of ferocious religion, could not be kept in ignorance of his principles. We argued ethics sophistically as to whether a convinced agnostic might on occasion hide what he believed.
Sometimes this friend of mine went to the library with me. He had the _penchant_ for science so common among the finer rising types of the lower classes. So I read Darwin's _Origin of Species_, and talked of it with my Michigan man. And then I took to Savage Landor and learnt some of his _Imaginary Conversations_ by heart. I could have repeated _Æsop_ and _Rhodope_.
But the one thing I for ever fell back upon was an old encyclopædia. I should be afraid to say how much I read, but to it I owe, doubtless, a stock of extensive, if shallow, general knowledge. Certainly it appears to have influenced me to this day; for given a similar one I can wander from shipbuilding to St. Thomas Aquinas; from the Atomic Theory to the Marquis de Sade; from Kant to the building of dams; and never feel dull.
Now when I come across any of these books I am filled with a curious melancholy. The _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ means more to me than to some: I hear the whirr of the buzz-saw as I open it; even in its driest page I smell the resin of fir and spruce; Locke's _Human Understanding_ recalls things no man can understand if he has not worked alongside Indians and next to Chinamen. As for Carlyle, I never hear him mentioned without seeing the mountains and glaciers of the Selkirks; in his pages is the sound of the wind and rain.