village carpenter, a man whose aged and labour-warped body contained the
simplest and purest of spirits. Yet his simplicity was by no means the
result of ignorance, for from the teachings of Plato to those of Hobbes
there were few systems ever thought out by man which he had not studied
and weighed. Books were far dearer in my boyhood than they are now, and
carpenters were less well paid, but old Palmer had neither wife nor
child, and spent little on food or raiment. Thus it came about that on
the shelf over his bed he had a more choice collection of books--few as
they were in number--than the squire or the parson, and these books he
had read until he not only understood them himself, but could impart
them to others.

This white-bearded and venerable village philosopher would sit by his
cabin door upon a summer evening, and was never so pleased as when some
of the young fellows would slip away from their bowls and their
quoit-playing in order to lie in the grass at his feet, and ask him
questions about the great men of old, their words and their deeds.
But of all the youths I and Reuben Lockarby, the innkeeper's son, were
his two favourites, for we would come the earliest and stop the latest
to hear the old man talk. No father could have loved his children
better than he did us, and he would spare no pains to get at our callow
thoughts, and to throw light upon whatever perplexed or troubled us.
Like all growing things, we had run our heads against the problem of the
universe. We had peeped and pryed with our boyish eyes into those
profound depths in which the keenest-sighted of the human race had seen
no bottom. Yet when we looked around us in our own village world, and
saw the bitterness and rancour which pervaded every sect, we could not
but think that a tree which bore such fruit must have something amiss
with it. This was one of the thoughts unspoken to our parents which we
carried to good old Zachary, and on which he had much to say which