"Would you like to send any word to your folks or to grandmother and the
old Squire?" I asked.

"Better not," said he with a kind of solemn sullenness. "I am out of all
that. I'm the same's dead."

I could see that he wished it so. He had not really and in so many words
acknowledged his identity; but when I turned to go he followed me to the
log fence round the garden and as I got over grasped my hand and held on
for the longest time! I thought he would never let go. His hand felt
rather cold. I suppose the sight of me and the home speech brought his
early life vividly back to him. He swallowed hard several times without
speaking, and again I saw his wrinkled face working. He let go at last,
went heavily back and picked up his hoe; and as we drove on I saw him
hoeing stolidly.

The driver said that he had cleared up the little farm and built the log
house and barn all by his own labor. For five years he had lived alone,
but later he had married the widow of a Scotch immigrant. I noticed that
this French-Canadian driver called him "M'sieur Andrews." It would seem
that he had changed his name and begun anew in the world--or had tried
to. How far he had succeeded I am unable to say.

I could not help feeling puzzled as well as depressed. The proper course
under such circumstances is not wholly clear. Had his former friends a
right to know what I had discovered? Right or wrong, what I decided on
was to say nothing so long as the old man lived. Three years afterwards
I wrote to a person whose acquaintance I had made at Three Rivers,
asking him whether an old American, residing at a place I described,
were still living, and received a reply saying that he was and
apparently in good health. But two years later this same Canadian
acquaintance, remembering my inquiry, wrote to say that the old man I
had once asked about had just died, but that his widow was still living
at their little farm and getting along as well as could be expected.

Then one day as the old Squire and I were driving home from a grange
meeting I told him what I had learned five years before concerning the
fate of his old friend. It was news to him, and yet he did not appear to
be wholly surprised.

"I don't know, sir, whether I have done right or not, keeping this from
you so long," I said after a moment of silence.

"I think you did perfectly right," the old Squire said after a pause.
"You did what I myself, I am sure, would have done under the
circ