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 Kansas and Illino