plied his small
wants he was known as "Kernel," "Judge," and "Boss." To the general
public "The Man on the Beach" was considered a sufficiently
distinguishing title. His name, his occupation, rank, or antecedents,
nobody cared to inquire. Whether this arose from a fear of reciprocal
inquiry and interest, or from the profound indifference before referred
to, I cannot say.

He did not look like a hermit. A man yet young, erect, well-dressed,
clean-shaven, with a low voice, and a smile half melancholy, half
cynical, was scarcely the conventional idea of a solitary. His
dwelling, a rude improvement on a fisherman's cabin, had all the severe
exterior simplicity of frontier architecture, but within it was
comfortable and wholesome. Three rooms--a kitchen, a living room, and
a bedroom--were all it contained.

He had lived there long enough to see the dull monotony of one season
lapse into the dull monotony of the other. The bleak northwest
trade-winds had brought him mornings of staring sunlight and nights of
fog and silence. The warmer southwest trades had brought him clouds,
rain, and the transient glories of quick grasses and odorous beach
blossoms. But summer or winter, wet or dry season, on one side rose
always the sharply defined hills with their changeless background of
evergreens; on the other side stretched always the illimitable ocean as
sharply defined against the horizon, and as unchanging in its hue. The
onset of spring and autumn tides, some changes among his feathered
neighbors, the footprints of certain wild animals along the river's
bank, and the hanging out of party-colored signals from the wooded
hillside far inland, helped him to record the slow months. On summer
afternoons, when the sun sank behind a bank of fog that, moving
solemnly shoreward, at last encompassed him and blotted out sea and
sky, his isolation was complete. The damp gray sea that flowed above
and around and about him always seemed to shut out an intangible world
beyond, and to be the only real presence. The booming of breakers
scarce a dozen rods from his dwelling was but a vague and
unintelligible sound, or the echo of something past forever. Every
morning when the sun tore away the misty curtain he awoke, dazed and
bewildered, as upon a new world. The first sense of oppression over,
he came to love at last this subtle spirit of oblivion; and at night,
when its cloudy wings were folded over his cabin, he would sit alone