friends, Elder Staples, the minister, Deacon Warner, and Skipper Evans.
He was an expert angler, and knew all the haunts of pickerel and trout
for many miles around. His favorite place of resort was the hill back
of his house, which afforded a view of the long valley of the Tocketuck
and the great sea. Here he would sit, enjoying the calm beauty of the
landscape, pointing out to me localities interesting from their
historical or traditional associations, or connected in some way with
humorous or pathetic passages of his own life experience. Some of these
autobiographical fragments affected me deeply. In narrating them he
invested familiar and commonplace facts with something of the
fascination of romance. "Human life," he would say, "is the same
everywhere. If we could but get at the truth, we should find that all
the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare have been reproduced in this
little village. God has made all of one blood; what is true of one man
is in some sort true of another; manifestations may differ, but the
essential elements and spring of action are the same. On the surface,
everything about us just now looks prosaic and mechanical; you see only
a sort of bark-mill grinding over of the same dull, monotonous grist of
daily trifles. But underneath all this there is an earnest life, rich
and beautiful with love and hope, or dark with hatred, and sorrow, and
remorse. That fisherman by the riverside, or that woman at the stream
below, with her wash-tub,--who knows what lights and shadows checker
their memories, or what present thoughts of theirs, born of heaven or
hell, the future shall ripen into deeds of good or evil? Ah, what have
I not seen and heard? My profession has been to me, in some sort, like
the vial genie of the Salamanca student; it has unroofed these houses,
and opened deep, dark chambers to the hearts of their tenants, which no
eye save that of God had ever looked upon. Where I least expected them,
I have encountered shapes of evil; while, on the other hand, I have
found beautiful, heroic love and self-denial in those who had seemed to