I listened to this comfortable sail-loft sage, and going back to the grocery store one afternoon took another look at the long, grim-faced silent figure.  He was sitting in the shadow of one of his moldy corners, and if there had ever been any light of merriment in his face it was not there now.  He looked as fixed and solemn as an ancient puritan, and yet there was something so melancholy in the man’s eye, so sad and disappointed, that it seemed anything but hard.  Two or three little children were playing about the door and when he came forward to wait on me one of them sidled forward and put her chubby hand in his.

“Your children?” I asked, by way of reaching some friendly understanding.

“No,” he replied, looking fondly down, “she belongs to a French lady up the street here.  She often comes down to see me, don’t you?” and he reached over and took the fat little cheek between his thumb and forefinger.

The little one rubbed her face against his worn baggy trousers’ leg and put her arm about his knee.  Quietly he stood there in a simple way until she loosened her hold upon him, when he went about his labor.

I was sitting one day in the loft of the comfortable sail-maker, who, by the way, was brother-in-law to Burridge, when I said to him: 

“I wish you’d tell me the details about Elihu.  How did he come to be what he is?  You ought to know; you’ve lived here all your life.”

“So I do know,” he replied genially.  “What do you want me to tell you?”

“The whole story of the trouble between him and Palmer; how he comes to be at outs with all these people.”

“Well,” he began, and here followed with many interruptions and side elucidations, which for want of space have been eliminated, the following details: 

Twenty-five years before Elihu had been the leading citizen of Noank.  From operating a small grocery at the close of the Civil War he branched out until he sold everything from ship-rigging to hardware.  Noank was then in the height of its career as a fishing town and as a port from which expeditions of all sorts were wont to sail.  Whaling was still in force, and vessels for whaling expeditions were equipped here.  Wealthy sea-captains frequently loaded fine three-masted schooners here for various trading expeditions to all parts of the world; the fishers for mackerel, cod and herring were making three hundred and fifty dollars a day in season, and thousands of dollars’ worth of supplies were annually purchased here.

Burridge was then the only tradesman of any importance and, being of a liberal, strong-minded and yet religious turn, attracted the majority of this business to him.  He had houses and lands, was a deacon in the local Baptist Church and a counselor in matters political, social and religious, whose advice was seldom rejected.  Every Fourth of July during these years it was his custom to collect all the children of the town in