store" as a clerk, which seemed to the boy at
one time an ideal situation for a young man.

"A store, indeed!" cried the young lady; "pomatum on your hair, and a
grin on your face; snip, snip, snip, calico, ribbons, yard-stick; 'It's
very becoming, miss, that color; this is only a sample, only a remnant,
but I shall have a new stock in by Friday; anything else, ma'am, today?'
Sho! Philip, for a man!"

Fortunately for Philip there lived in the village an old waif, a
scholarly oddity, uncommunicative, whose coming to dwell there had
excited much gossip before the inhabitants got used to his odd ways.

Usually reticent and rough of speech--the children thought he was an old
bear--he was nevertheless discovered to be kindly and even charitable in
neighborhood emergencies, and the minister said he was about the most
learned man he ever knew. His history does not concern us, but he was
doubtless one of the men whose talents have failed to connect with
success in anything, who had had his bout with the world, and retired
into peaceful seclusion in an indulgence of a mild pessimism about the
world generally.

He lived alone, except for the rather neutral presence of Aunt Hepsy, who
had formerly been a village tailoress, and whose cottage he had bought
with the proviso that the old woman should continue in it as "help."
With Aunt Hepsy he was no more communicative than with anybody else. "He
was always readin', when he wasn't goin' fishin' or off in the woods with
his gun, and never made no trouble, and was about the easiest man to get
along with she ever see. You mind your business and he'll mind his'n."
That was the sum of Aunt Hepsy's delivery about the recluse, though no
doubt her old age was enriched by constant "study" over his probable
history and character. But Aunt Hepsy, since she had given up tailoring,
was something of a recluse herself.

The house was full of books, mostly queer books, "in languages nobody
knows what," as Aunt Hepsy said, which made Philip open his eyes when he
went there one day to take to the old man a memorandum-book which he had
found on Mill Brook. The recluse took a fancy to the ingenuous lad when
he saw he was interested in books, and perhaps had a mind not much more
practical than his own; the result was an acquaintance, and finally an
intimacy--at which the village wondered until it transpired that Philip
was studying with the old fellow, who was no doubt a poor shack of a
school-teach