w old profiles of persons who, however substantial they once
were, are now leading a life of mere outlines. I would like to give
them a less faded expression, but the past is very chary of yielding up
anything more than its shadows.

The first who presents himself is the ruminative hermit already
mentioned--a species of uninspired Thoreau. His name was Benjamin Lear.
So far as his craziness went, he might have been a lineal descendant of
that ancient king of Britain who figures on Shakespeare's page. Family
dissensions made a recluse of King Lear; but in the case of Benjamin
there were no mitigating circumstances. He had no family to trouble
him, and his realm remained undivided. He owned an excellent farm on the
south side of Sagamore Creek, a little to the west of the bridge, and
might have lived at ease, if personal comfort had not been distasteful
to him. Personal comfort entered into no part of Lear's. To be alone
filled the little pint-measure of his desire. He ensconced himself in
a wretched shanty, and barred the door, figuratively, against all the
world. Wealth--what would have been wealth to him--lay within his reach,
but he thrust it aside; he disdained luxury as he disdained idleness,
and made no compromise with convention. When a man cuts himself
absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar
floats him! How few his wants are, after all! Lear was of a cheerful
disposition, and seems to have been wholly inoffensive--at a distance.
He fabricated his own clothes, and subsisted chiefly on milk and
potatoes, the product of his realm. He needed nothing but an island to
be a Robinson Crusoe. At rare intervals he flitted like a frost-bitten
apparition through the main street of Portsmouth, which he always
designated as "the Bank," a name that had become obsolete fifty or a
hundred years before. Thus, for nearly a quarter of a century, Benjamin
Lear stood aloof from human intercourse. In his old age some of the
neighbors offered him shelter during the tempestuous winter months; but
he would have none of it--he defied wind and weather. There he lay in
his dilapidated hovel in his last illness, refusing to allow any one to
remain with him overnight--and the mercury four degrees below zero. Lear
was born in 1720, and vegetated eighty-two years.

I take it that Timothy Winn, of whom we have only a glimpse, would like
to have more, was a person better worth knowing. His name reads like the
title of some