the time when she was beginning to feel a little shy and long-legged, in
her short skirts, who had, in a romantic sympathy with his tastes,
opposed his going into a "store" as a clerk, which seemed to the boy at
one time an ideal situation for a young man.

"A store, indeed!" cried the young lady; "pomatum on your hair, and a
grin on your face; snip, snip, snip, calico, ribbons, yard-stick; 'It's
very becoming, miss, that color; this is only a sample, only a remnant,
but I shall have a new stock in by Friday; anything else, ma'am, today?'
Sho! Philip, for a man!"

Fortunately for Philip there lived in the village an old waif, a
scholarly oddity, uncommunicative, whose coming to dwell there had
excited much gossip before the inhabitants got used to his odd ways.

Usually reticent and rough of speech--the children thought he was an old
bear--he was nevertheless discovered to be kindly and even charitable in
neighborhood emergencies, and the minister said he was about the most
learned man he ever knew. His history does not concern us, but he was
doubtless one of the men whose talents have failed to connect with
success in anything, who had had his bout with the world, and retired
into peaceful seclusion in an indulgence of a mild pessimism about the
world generally.

He lived alone, except for the rather neutral presence of Aunt Hepsy, who
had formerly been a village tailoress, and whose cottage he had bought
with the proviso that the old woman should continue in it as "help."
With Aunt Hepsy he was no more communicative than with anybody else. "He
was always readin', when he wasn't goin' fishin' or off in the woods with
his gun, and never made no trouble, and was about the easiest man to get