laid their hands.

Months passed and became years. Boaz Negro did not rebuild his house.
He might have done so, out of his earnings, for upon himself he
spent scarcely anything, reverting to his old habit of an almost
miserly economy. Yet perhaps it would have been harder after all.
For his earnings were less and less. In that town a cobbler who sits
in an empty shop is apt to want for trade. Folk take their boots to
mend where they take their bodies to rest and their minds to be
edified.

No longer did the walls of Boaz's shop resound to the boastful
recollections of young men. Boaz had changed. He had become not only
different, but opposite. A metaphor will do best. The spirit of Boaz
Negro had been a meadowed hillside giving upon the open sea, the sun,
the warm, wild winds from beyond the blue horizon. And covered with
flowers, always hungry and thirsty for the sun and the fabulous wind
and bright showers of rain. It had become an entrenched camp, lying
silent, sullen, verdureless, under a gray sky. He stood solitary
against the world. His approaches were closed. He was blind, and he
was also deaf and dumb.

Against that what can young fellows do who wish for nothing but to
rest themselves and talk about their friends and enemies? They had
come and they had tried. They had raised their voices even higher
than before. Their boasts had grown louder, more presumptuous, more
preposterous, until, before the cold separation of that unmoving and
as if contemptuous presence in the cobbler's chair, they burst of
their own air, like toy balloons. And they went and left Boaz alone.

There was another thing which served, if not to keep them away, at
least not to entice them back. That was the aspect of the place. It
was not cheerful. It invited no one. In its way that fire-bitten
ruin grew to be almost as great a scandal as the act itself had been.
It was plainly an eyesore. A valuable property, on the town's main
thoroughfare--and an eyesore! The neighbouring owners protested.

Their protestations might as well have gone against a stone wall.
That man was deaf and dumb. He had become, in a way, a kind of
vegetable, for the quality of a vegetable is that, while it is
endowed with life, it remains fixed in one spot. For years Boaz was
scarcely seen to move foot out of that shop that was left him, a
small square, blistered promontory on the shores of ruin.

He must indeed have carried out some rudimentary sort of domestic