s
had blotched them. His breakfast he prepared himself, afterward washing
the dishes. Then he would light his pipe or his cigar and take from the
shelf the uppermost copy of the pile of _Daily Republicans_ there. With
the love for tidiness and kemptness that was a part of him he would
smooth out its creases, then sit down on his veranda to read it.
Immediately he became detached from all his surroundings. By his
concentration he was isolated from and insulated against all external
influences. He was not in Good Friday Island then; he was in South New
Medford.

Each morning he read his paper through from the top line of the first
column of the first page to the bottom line of the last column of the
fourth, or last, page. He read it all--news matter, local items,
clippings, advertisements, want notices, church notices, lodge notices,
patent insides of boiler plate, fashion department, household hints,
farm hints, reprint, Births, Weddings and Deaths; syndicate stuff, rural
correspondence--no line of its contents did he skip. With his eyes shut
he could put his finger upon those advertisements which ran without
change and occupied set places on this page or that; such, for instance,
as the two-column display of J. Wesley Paxon, Livery Barn, Horses Kept
and Baited, Vehicles at all hours, Funeral Attendance a Specialty; and
the two-inch notice of the American Pantorium and Pressing Club,
Membership $1.00 per Month, Garments Called For and Delivered, Phone No.
41, M. Pincus, Prop. He was like a miser with a loaf; no crumb, however
tiny, got away from him. To him there was more of absorbing interest in
the appearance of the seventeen-year locust in Chittenden County than in
a Balkan outbreak; less of interest in the failing state of health of
the Czar than in the prospects for the hay crop in the Otter Creek
valley.

When he had read on through to the last ink-smudged line he would reread
the accounts of those matters which particularly attracted him on their
first reading. Then reluctantly and still in his state of absorption, he
would put the paper aside and going inside to a small desk would write
his daily chapter in a bulky letter, the whole to be posted on the next
steamer day. It was characteristic of the man that in his letter writing
he customarily dealt in comment upon the minor affairs of South New
Medford as they had passed in review before him in the printed columns,
rather than in observations regarding witness