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��THE GRANITE MONTHLY.
��Washington.
��and therefore would re- mark on such occasions that he had a clean right to liberty so long as he did not break any law. But Polly never lectured him on his short com- ings. In fact I once heard her tell my mother that she had n't any calling to preach repentance to him. More than all I acknowledge that it would 'nt have done any good if she had."
"'Old Steve' — and I guess I have not told you that he has been dead nearly forty years — was a good-natured sort of a man who calculated to do about right by every body, failing in which it was a mishap of the head and not of the heart. He worked hard to get ahead in the world, and — the coun- try being settled around here by eight- een hundred — to give his two sons and his daughter a proper education. He had good furniture and house fixtures for them days. He had good sheds and a first rate barn — which I removed several years ago — and he had, by hard knocks and diligence, by working early and late and in all kinds of weather, cleared up more than twenty acres of land. Why in his day this peninsula was as pretty as any picture of paradise you ever saw. More than all he had a fine lot of live stock, and a horse and horse-boat. In fact he had a plenty of every thing that a man needs to make himself and his family comforta- ble and happy. In the winter he hauled wood on the ice and sold it in the village, going in the morning in time to take his children to school, and again in the afternoon in time to bring them home. In the spring and summer he hurried up his farming, and at odd times boated provisions and brick. Now you would naturally suppose, strangers, that a man of this energy would have the respect of the community, wouldn't you?"
We agreed that we should.
" Well he did not. Somehow — and I cannot for the life of me make it out — every body was sort of suspicious of him. You see he was no society man ; he would n't give a penny toward building a meeting-house — although noon.
��Polly and the children contributed liberally — he would n't do his part to- ward supporting the preaching of the gospel, and he was 'nt a church-going Christian, whatever he was, which made more difference in the opinions of people in those days than it does in this year of grace. And beside all the rest he was not a well dressed man, and his education had been neglected, all of which was against him with conscientious folks. Yes, he had his faults. He was a little slack about somethings, he would 'nt refuse a glass of grog on training days, and he would do chores on Sunday, which most every body thought a great sin. You see he was only old Steve Waldron, and no body cared much about him, as it appeared on the surface. ' But for all that, if I do say it, he had a heart in him as big as that of an ox, and as tender as that of a nursing baby. It was n't in him to do a man a wrong or an injury. Add to this that he was some more than seventy years old at the time when the circumstances which I am about to relate occurred ; that he was a man who had never known affliction, and therefore was not equal to an emergency of awful trouble, and you have a pretty good likeness of the man. Now I will tell you what happened to him."
" It was in the spring that I was one- and-twenty, which must have been in '30. One morning there came to Old Steve's house a village schoolmaster by the name of Thomas Mudgett. Old Steve knew him well. It was Saturday. There was no school that day and so he was out for some fishing sport on the ice. For reasons best known to himself he gave his watch and wallet, — containing several hun- dred dollars — to Polly for safe-keeping. Then, as it turned out, his lines were not long enough for deep water fishing, and so he borrowed from old Steve and left his behind him. He then made arrangements for supper and lodgings, and went out upon the bay. I remem- ber seeing him there late in the after-
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