front of his store and treat them to ice-cream.  Every Christmas Eve he traveled about the streets in a wagon, which carried half a dozen barrels of candy and nuts, which he would ladle out to the merry shouting throng of pursuing youngsters, until all were satisfied.  For the skating season he prepared a pond, spending several thousand dollars damming up a small stream, in order that the children might have a place to skate.  He created a library where all might obtain suitable reading, particularly the young.

On New Year’s morning it was his custom to visit all the poor and bereaved and lonely in Noank, taking a great dray full of presents and leaving a little something with his greetings and a pleasant handshake at every door.  The lonely rich as well as the lonely poor were included, for he was certain, as he frequently declared, that the rich could be lonely too.

He once told his brother-in-law that one New Year’s Day a voice called to him in church:  “Elihu Burridge, how about the lonely rich and poor of Noank?” “Up I got,” he concluded, “and from that day to this I have never neglected them.”

When any one died who had a little estate to be looked after for the benefit of widows or orphans, Burridge was the one to take charge of it.  People on their deathbeds sent for him, and he always responded, taking energetic charge of everything and refusing to take a penny for his services.  After a number of years the old judge to whom he always repaired with these matters of probate, knowing his generosity in this respect, also refused to accept any fee.  When he saw him coming he would exclaim: 

“Well, Elihu, what is it this time?  Another widow or orphan that we’ve got to look after?”

After Elihu had explained what it was, he would add: 

“Well, Elihu, I do hope that some day some rich man will call you to straighten out his affairs.  I’d like to see you get a little something, so that I might get a little something.  Eh, Elihu?” Then he would jocularly poke his companion in charity in the ribs.

These general benefactions were continuous and coeval with his local prosperity and dominance, and their modification as well as the man’s general decline the result of the rise of this other individual—­Robert Palmer,—­“operating” to take the color of power and preeminence from him.

Palmer was the owner of a small shipyard here at the time, a thing which was not much at first but which grew swiftly.  He was born in Noank also, a few years before Burridge, and as a builder of vessels had been slowly forging his way to a moderate competence when Elihu was already successful.  He was a keen, fine-featured, energetic individual, with excellent commercial and strong religious instincts, and by dint of hard labor and a saving disposition he obtained, soon after the Civil War, a powerful foothold.  Many vessels were ordered here from other cities.  Eventually he began to build barges in large numbers for a great railroad company.