One of my valued friends in the mountains, and one of the best hunters
with whom I ever travelled, was a man who had a peculiarly light-hearted
way of looking at conventional social obligations. Though in some ways
a true backwoods Donatello, he was a man of much shrewdness and of great
courage and resolution. Moreover, he possessed what only a few men do
possess, the capacity to tell the truth. He saw facts as they were, and
could tell them as they were, and he never told an untruth unless for
very weighty reasons. He was pre-eminently a philosopher, of a happy,
sceptical turn of mind. He had no prejudices. He never looked down, as
so many hard characters do, upon a person possessing a different code of
ethics. His attitude was one of broad, genial tolerance. He saw nothing
out of the way in the fact that he had himself been a road-agent, a
professional gambler, and a desperado at different stages of his career.
On the other hand, he did not in the least hold it against any one that
he had always acted within the law.
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