“What seems to be the trouble?”

“Oh, he’s just strong-headed, I guess.”  He paused, and ideas lagged until finally I observed: 

“It’s a very interesting store he keeps.”

“It’s just as Billy Drumgold told him once:  ‘Burridge,’ he says, ’you’ve got everything in this store that belongs to a full-rigged ship ’cept one thing.’  ‘What’s that?’ Burridge asks.  ‘A second-hand pulpit.’  ’Got that too,’ he answered, and takes him upstairs, and there he had one sure enough.”

“Well,” I said, “what was he doing with it?”

“Danged if I know.  He had it all right.  Has it yet, so they say.”

Days passed and as the summer waned the evidences of a peculiar life accumulated.  Noank, apparently, was at outs with Burridge on the subject of religion, and he with it.  There were instances of genuine hard feeling against him.

Writing a letter in the Postoffice one day I ventured to take up this matter with the postmaster.

“You know Mr. Burridge, don’t you—­the grocer?”

“Well, I should guess I did,” he replied with a flare.

“Anything wrong with him?”

“Oh, about everything that’s just plain cussed—­the most wrangling man alive.  I never saw such a man.  He don’t get his mail here no more because he’s mad at me, I guess.  Took it away because I had Mr. Palmer’s help in my fight, I suppose.  Wrote me that I should send all his mail up to Mystic, and he goes there three or four miles out of his way every day, just to spite me.  It’s against the law.  I hadn’t ought to be doing it, re-addressing his envelopes three or four times a day, but I do do it.  He’s a strong-headed man, that’s the trouble with Elihu.”

I had no time to follow this up then, but a little later, sitting in the shop of the principal sailboat maker, which was situated in the quiet little lane which follows the line of the village, I was one day surprised by the sudden warm feeling which the name of Elihu generated.  Something had brought up the subject of religion, and I said that Burridge seemed rather religious.

“Yes,” said the sailboat maker quickly, “he’s religious, all right, only he reads the Bible for others, not for himself.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why, he wants to run things, that’s what.  As long as you agree with Elihu, why, everything’s all right.  When you don’t, the Bible’s against you.  That’s the way he is.”

“Did he ever disagree with you?” I asked, suspecting some personal animus in the matter.

“Me and Elihu was always good friends as long as I agreed with him,” he went on bitterly.  “We’ve been raised together, man and boy, for pretty near sixty years.  We never had a word of any kind but what was friendly, as long as I agreed with him, but just as soon as I didn’t he took a set against me, and we ain’t never spoke a word since.”

“What was the trouble?” I inquired sweetly, anxious to come at the kernel of this queer situation.