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In later years there was a “revival” in Keene Valley, the result of which was a number of young “converts,” whom Phelps seemed to regard as a veteran might raw recruits, and to have his doubts what sort of soldiers they would make.

“Waal, Jimmy,” he said to one of them, “you’ve kindled a pretty good fire with light wood. That’s what we do of a dark night in the woods, you know but we do it just so as we can look around and find the solid wood: so now put on your solid wood.”

In the Sunday Bible classes of the period Phelps was a perpetual anxiety to the others, who followed closely the printed lessons, and beheld with alarm his discursive efforts to get into freer air and light. His remarks were the most refreshing part of the exercises, but were outside of the safe path into which the others thought it necessary to win him from his “speckerlations.” The class were one day on the verses concerning “God’s word” being “written on the heart,” and were keeping close to the shore, under the guidance of “Barnes’s Notes,” when Old Phelps made a dive to the bottom, and remarked that he had “thought a good deal about the expression, ‘God’s word written on the heart,’ and had been asking himself how that was to be done; and suddenly it occurred to him (having been much interested lately in watching the work of a photographer) that, when a photograph is going to be taken, all that has to be done is to put the object in position, and the sun makes the picture; and so he rather thought that all we had got to do was to put our hearts in place, and God would do the writin’.”

Phelps’s theology, like his science, is first-hand. In the woods, one day, talk ran on the Trinity as being nowhere asserted as a doctrine in the Bible, and some one suggested that the attempt to pack these great and fluent mysteries into one word must always be more or less unsatisfactory. “Ye-es,” droned Phelps: “I never could see much speckerlation in that expression the Trinity. Why, they’d a good deal better say Legion.”

The sentiment of the man about nature, or his poetic sensibility, was frequently not to be distinguished from a natural religion, and was always tinged with the devoutness of Wordsworth’s verse. Climbing slowly one day up the Balcony,–he was more than usually calm and slow,–he espied an exquisite fragile flower in the crevice of a rock, in a very lonely spot.

“It seems as if,” he said, or rather dreamed out, “it seems as if the Creator had kept something just to look at himself.”

To a lady whom he had taken to Chapel Pond (a retired but rather uninteresting spot), and who expressed a little disappointment at its tameness, saying, of this “Why, Mr. Phelps, the principal charm of this place seems to be its loneliness.”

“Yes,” he replied in gentle and lingering tones, and its nativeness. “It lies here just where it was born.”

Rest and quiet had infinite attractions for him. A secluded opening in the woods was a “calm spot.” He told of seeing once, or rather being in, a circular rainbow. He stood on Indian Head, overlooking the Lower Lake, so that he saw the whole bow in the sky and the lake, and seemed to be in the midst of it; “only at one place there was an indentation in it, where it rested on the lake, just enough to keep it from rolling off.” This “resting” of the sphere seemed to give him great comfort.

One Indian-summer morning in October, some ladies found the old man sitting on his doorstep smoking a short pipe.

He gave no sign of recognition except a twinkle of the eye, being evidently quite in harmony with the peaceful day. They stood there a full minute before he opened his mouth: then he did not rise, but slowly took his pipe from his mouth, and said in a dreamy way, pointing towards the brook,–