, still more to hear him, one would have sworn he was a good
fellow, a trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all right at bottom.
But the County Clerk of Dearborn County could have told you of
agriculturists who knew Erastus from long and unhappy experience, and
who held him to be even a tighter man than Loren Pierce in the matter of
a mortgage.

The third trustee, Levi Gorringe, set one wondering at the very first
glance what on earth he was doing in that company. Those who had known
him longest had the least notion; but it may be added that no one knew
him well. He was a lawyer, and had lived in Octavius for upwards of ten
years; that is to say, since early manhood. He had an office on the main
street, just under the principal photograph gallery. Doubtless he was
sometimes in this office; but his fellow-townsmen saw him more often
in the street doorway, with the stairs behind him, and the flaring
show-cases of the photographer on either side, standing with his hands
in his pockets and an unlighted cigar in his mouth, looking at nothing
in particular. About every other day he went off after breakfast into
the country roundabout, sometimes with a rod, sometimes with a gun, but
always alone. He was a bachelor, and slept in a room at the back of
his office, cooking some of his meals himself, getting others at a
restaurant close by. Though he had little visible practice, he was
understood to be well-to-do and even more, and people tacitly inferred
that he "shaved notes." The Methodists of Octavius looked upon him as
a queer fish, and through nearly a dozen years had never quite outgrown
their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing him enter their church.
He had never, it is true, professed religion, but they had elected him
as a trustee now for a number of terms, all the same--partly because he
was their only lawyer, partly because he, like both his colleagues, held
a mortgage on the church edifice and lot. In person, Mr. Gorringe was a
slender man, with a skin of a clear, uniform citron tint, black waving
hair, and dark gray eyes, and a thin, high-featured face. He wore
a mustache and pointed chin-tuft; and, though he was of New England
parentage and had never been further south than Ocean Grove, he
presented a general effect of old Mississippian traditions and tastes
startlingly at variance with the standards of Dearborn County Methodism.
Nothing could convince some of the elder sisters that he was not a
drinking man.