e fire and employed, in one way and another, a great deal of labour.
He held a number of shares in coasting vessels, and passed as owner of
half a dozen--all of them too heavily in debt to pay dividends.
He managed (ostensibly as proprietor, but actually in dependence on the
local bank) a shipbuilding-yard to which the fishermen came for their
boats. He had an interest in the profit of most of these boats when they
were launched, as also in a salt-store, a coal-store, a company for the
curing of pilchards, and an agency for buying and packing of fish for the
London market. He kept a retail shop and sold almost everything the town
needed, from guernseys and hardware to tea, bacon, and tallow candles.
He advanced money, at varying rates of interest, on anything from a ship
to a frying-pan; and by this means had made himself accurately acquainted
with his neighbours' varying degrees of poverty. But he was not rich,
although generally reputed so: for Ardevora's population was not one out
of which any man could make his fortune, and of poor folk who borrow or
obtain goods on credit quite a large number do not seriously mean to pay--
a fact often overlooked, and always by the borrowers themselves.

Still, and despite an occasional difficulty in keeping so many balls in
the air at one time, Elder Penno was--as a widower, a childless man, and
in comparison with his neighbours--well-to-do. Also he filled many small
public offices--district councillor, harbour commissioner, member of the
School Board, and the like. They had come to him--he could not quite
tell how. He took pride in them and discharged them conscientiously.
He knew that envious tongues accused him of using them to feather his
nest, but he also knew that they accused him falsely. He was
thick-skinned, and they might go to the devil. In person he was stout of
habit, brusque of bearing, with a healthy, sanguine complexion, a double
chin, shrewd grey eyes, and cropped hair which stood up straight as the
bristles on a brush. He lived abstemiously, rose at six, went to bed at
nine, and might be found, during most of the intervening hours, hard at
work at his desk in the little office behind his shop. The office had a
round window, and the window overlooked the quay, the small harbour
(dry at low water), and the curve of a sandy bay beyond.

One morning Elder Penno looked up from his desk and saw, beyond the masts
of the fishing-boats lying aslant as the tide h