William," to the
storekeeper, and walked steadily out into the night.

"Wall," said the skipper, "I am surprised! I strove to think o' suthin'
to say, all the time he was here, but I swow I couldn't think o'
nothin'. I couldn't ask him if it seemed good to git home, nor how the
thermometer had varied in different parts o' the town where he'd been.
Everything seemed to fetch right up standin' to the State's-prison."

"I was just goin' to say, 'How'd ye leave everybody?'" said Doane; "but
that kind o' seemed to bring up them he'd left. I felt real bad, though,
to hev the feller go off 'thout none on us speakin' to him. He's got a
hard furrer to plough; and yet I don't s'pose there's much harm in him,
'f Eliphalet only keeps quiet."

"Eliphalet!" said a young sailor, contemptuously. "No fear o' him! They
say he's so sca't of Eph he hain't hardly swallowed nothin' for a week."

"But where will he live?" asked a short, curly-haired young man, whom
Eph had seemed not to recognize. It was the new doctor, who, after
having made his way through college and "the great medical school in
Boston," had, two years before, settled in this village.

"I believe," said Mr. Adams, rubbing his hands, "that he wrote to
Joshua Carr last winter, when his mother died, not to let the little
place she left, on the Salt Hay Road, and I understand that he is going
to make his home there. It is an old house, you know, and not worth
much, but it is weather-tight, I should say."

"Speakin' of his writin' to Joshua," said Doane, "I have heard such a
sound as that he used to shine up to Joshua's Susan, years back. But
that's all ended now. You won't catch Susan marryin' no jailbirds."

"But how will he live?" said the doctor. "Will anybody give him work?"

"Let him alone for livin'," said Doane. "He can ketch more fish than any
other two men in the place--allers seemed to kind o' hev a knack o'
whistlin' 'em right into the boat. And then Nelson Briggs, that settled
up his mother's estate, allows he's got over a hundred and ten dollars
for him, after payin' debts and all probate expenses, and that and the
place is all he needs to start on."

"I will go to see him," said the doctor to himself, as he went out upon
the requisition of a grave man in a red tippet, who had just come for
him. "He doesn't look so very dangerous, and I think he can be tamed. I
remember that his mother told me about him."

Late that night, returning from his seven miles'