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“Longer than I wish to have been. This is the land of blue-laws, as you will find.”

“And it is nothing that I know of the color of the laws, whether they be blue, or red, or white. Can you tell me of some one to whom a shipwrecked sailor could go for a roof to shelter him, and some friendly advice? You may be the very man?”

“No, no, no. I am not your man. My name is Peters, Samuel Peters, and I am loyal to my king and my own country, and here the people’s hearts are turning away from both. I am one too many here. But there is one man in these parts to whom every one in trouble goes for advice. If a goose were to break her leg she would go to him to set it. The very hens go and cackle before his door. Children carry him arbutuses and white lady’s-slippers in the spring, and wild grapes in the fall, and the very Indians double up so when they pass his house on the way to school. His house is in the perpendicular style of architecture, I think. Close by it is a store where they talk Latin and Greek on the grist barrels, and they tell such stories there as one never heard before. He settles all the church and colony troubles, which are many, doctors the sick, and keeps unfaculized people, as they call the poor here, from becoming an expense to the town. He looks solemn, and wears dignified clothes, but he has a heart for everybody; the very dogs run after him in the street, and the little Indian children do the same. He is a kind of Solomon. What other people don’t know, he does. But he has a suspicious eye for me.”