If the reader has five or ten minutes to waste, I invite him to glance at a few old profiles of persons who, however substantial they once were, are now leading a life of mere outlines.  I would like to give them a less faded expression, but the past is very chary of yielding up anything more than its shadows.

The first who presents himself is the ruminative hermit already mentioned—­a species of uninspired Thoreau.  His name was Benjamin Lear.  So far as his craziness went, he might have been a lineal descendant of that ancient king of Britain who figures on Shakespeare’s page.  Family dissensions made a recluse of King Lear; but in the case of Benjamin there were no mitigating circumstances.  He had no family to trouble him, and his realm remained undivided.  He owned an excellent farm on the south side of Sagamore Creek, a little to the west of the bridge, and might have lived at ease, if personal comfort had not been distasteful to him.  Personal comfort entered into no part of Lear’s.  To be alone filled the little pint-measure of his desire.  He ensconced himself in a wretched shanty, and barred the door, figuratively, against all the world.  Wealth—­what would have been wealth to him—­lay within his reach, but he thrust it aside; he disdained luxury as he disdained idleness, and made no compromise with convention.  When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him!  How few his wants are, after all!  Lear was of a cheerful disposition, and seems to have been wholly inoffensive—­at a distance.  He fabricated his own clothes, and subsisted chiefly on milk and potatoes, the product of his realm.  He needed nothing but an island to be a Robinson Crusoe.  At rare intervals he flitted like a frost-bitten apparition through the main street of Portsmouth, which he always designated as “the Bank,” a name that had become obsolete fifty or a hundred years before.  Thus, for nearly a quarter of a century, Benjamin Lear stood aloof from human intercourse.  In his old age some of the neighbors offered him shelter during the tempestuous winter months; but he would have none of it—­he defied wind and weather.  There he lay in his dilapidated hovel in his last illness, refusing to allow any one to remain with him overnight—­and the mercury four degrees below zero.  Lear was born in 1720, and vegetated eighty-two years.

I take it that Timothy Winn, of whom we have only a glimpse, would like to have more, was a person better worth knowing.  His name reads like the title of some old-fashioned novel—­“Timothy Winn, or the Memoirs of a Bashful Gentleman.”  He came to Portsmouth from Woburn at the close of the last century, and set up in the old museum-building on Mulberry Street what was called “a piece goods store.”  He was the third Timothy in his monotonous family, and in order to differentiate himself he inscribed on the sign over his shop door, “Timothy Winn, 3d,” and was ever after