Thoreau on a Canadian Woodchopper

A lumberjack.

"Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man,--he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here,--A Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught... When I approached him he would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at any thing which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim,--'By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better sport.'"

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).