inful to record in detail the cracking-off process, the slipping into
shale, the rolling, the ending up in Hampton, where Edward had now for
some dozen years been keeper of one of the gates in the frowning brick
wall bordering the canal,--a position obtained for him by a compassionate
but not too prudent childhood friend who had risen in life and knew the
agent of the Chippering Mill, Mr. Claude Ditmar. Thus had virtue failed
to hold its own.

One might have thought in all these years he had sat within the gates
staring at the brick row of the company's boarding houses on the opposite
bank of the canal that reflection might have brought a certain degree of
enlightenment. It was not so. The fog of Edward's bewilderment never
cleared, and the unformed question was ever clamouring for an answer--how
had it happened? Job's cry. How had it happened to an honest and virtuous
man, the days of whose forebears had been long in the land which the Lord
their God had given them? Inherently American, though lacking the saving
quality of push that had been the making of men like Ditmar, he never
ceased to regard with resentment and distrust the hordes of foreigners
trooping between the pillars, though he refrained from expressing these
sentiments in public; a bent, broad shouldered, silent man of that
unmistakable physiognomy which, in the seventeenth century, almost wholly
deserted the old England for the new. The ancestral features were there,
the lips--covered by a grizzled moustache moulded for the precise
formation that emphasizes such syllables as el, the hooked nose and
sallow cheeks, the grizzled brows and grey eyes drawn down at the
corners. But for all its ancestral strength of feature, it was a face
from which will had been extracted, and lacked the fire and fanaticism,
the indomitable hardness it should have proclaimed, and which have been
so characteristically embodied in Mr. St. Gaudens's statue of the
Puritan. His clothes were slightly shabby, but always neat.

Little as one might have guessed it, however, what may be called a
certain transmuted enthusiasm was alive in him. He had a hobby almost
amounting to an obsession, not uncommon amongst Americans who have
slipped downward in the social scale. It was the Bumpus Family in
America. He collected documents about his ancestors and relations, he
wrote letters with a fine, painful penmanship on a ruled block he bought
at Hartshorne's drug store to distant Bumpuses in Kan