FROM THE LIFE
The belief that he was an imbecile was weakened when it was seen with what ingenuity he fitted up his shack, making himself a sort of bake-oven of stones, taking useless blocks of wood from the boat- building and nailing planks to them for benches, cutting fir branches for a bed, mending his roof with rotted canvas from the wharf and painting it over with tar, unraveling old nets to make himself fishing-lines for rusty hooks that had been thrown away by the village boys, and in everything proceeding as rationally as a Robinson Crusoe. The suspicion that he was a criminal hi hiding could not endure after it was observed that he avoided strangers less than he did the acquaintances of his working-hours and seemed more uneasy with the benevolent Captain Jim than with anybody else. His incredible hairlessness was explained by a young doctor—summoned to the village to set the broken leg of one of the boat-builders—who gave it out that Sam was the victim of a skin disease with a sesquipedalian scientific name. But on the mystery of where he had come from or why he had come nothing happened to throw any light.
One of the men stole up to the shack at night and peeped through a crack in the boarding. He came away with a report that the old man sat for hours by his lantern, looking at his hands. Certainly he used an amount of oil that was not accounted for until the village found that his light burned every night till sunrise. Some small boys,
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