gh pent roof, where there had once
been a long sweep.

These simple features showed to the village on the opposite slope with a
distinctness that made the place seem much lonelier than if it had been
much more remote. It gained no cheerfulness from its proximity, and when
the windows of the house lighted up with the pale gleam of the sunset,
they imparted to the village a sense of dreary solitude which its own
lamps could do nothing to relieve.

Ransom Hilbrook came and went among the villagers in the same sort of
inaccessible contiguity. He did not shun passing the time of day with
people he met; he was in and out at the grocer's, the meat man's, the
baker's, upon the ordinary domestic occasions; but he never darkened any
other doors, except on his visits to the bank where he cashed the checks
for his quarterly allowance. There had been a proposition to use him
representatively in the ceremonies celebrating the acceptance of the
various gifts of Josiah Hilbrook; but he had not lent himself to this,
and upon experiment the authorities found that he was right in his guess
that they could get along without him.

He had not said it surlily, but sadly, and with a gentle deprecation of
their insistence. While the several monuments that testified to his
cousin's wealth and munificence rose in the village beyond the brook, he
continued in the old homestead without change, except that when his
housekeeper died he began to do for himself the few things that the
ailing and aged woman had done for him. How he did them was not known,
for he invited no intimacy from his neighbors. But from the extent of
his dealings with the grocer it was imagined that he lived mainly upon
canned goods. The fish man paid him a weekly visit, and once a week he
got from the meat man a piece of salt pork, which it was obvious to the
meanest intelligence was for his Sunday baked beans. From his purchase
of flour and baking powder it was reasonably inferred that he now and
then made himself hot biscuit. Beyond these meagre facts everything was
conjecture, in which the local curiosity played somewhat actively, but,
for the most part, with a growing acquiescence in the general ignorance
none felt authorized to dispel. There had been a time when some
fulfilled a fancied duty to the solitary in trying to see him. But the
visitors who found him out of doors were not asked within, and were
obliged to dismiss themselves, after an interview across the pickets