ge
Knowles has gone. Slipped his cable about four o'clock, so Mike told
me. There's a good man gone, by Henry! Don't seem hardly as if it could
be, does it?"

That was exactly what Bayport said when it heard the ill tidings. It did
not seem as if it could be. The judge had been so long a dominant figure
in town affairs, his strong will had so long helped to mould and lead
opinion and his shrewd common sense had so often guided the community,
and individuals, through safe channels and out of troubled waters, that
it was hard to comprehend the fact that he would lead and guide no more.
He had many enemies, no man with his determined character could avoid
that, but they were altogether of a type whose enmity was, to decent
people, preferable to their friendship. During his life it had seemed as
if he were a lonely man, but his funeral was the largest held in Bayport
since the body of Colonel Seth Foster, killed at Gettysburg, was brought
home from the front for burial.

It was a gloomy, drizzly day when the long line of buggies and carryalls
and folk on foot followed the hearse to the cemetery amid the pines.
Captain Sears, looking back at the procession, thought of the judge's
many prophecies and grim jokes concerning this very journey, and he
wondered--well, he wondered as most of us wonder on such occasions. Also
he realized that, although their acquaintanceship had been brief, he was
going to miss Judge Knowles tremendously.

"I wish I had been lucky enough to know him sooner," he told Judah that
evening.

Judah pulled his nose reflectively. "It kind of surprised me," he
observed, "to hear what the minister said about him. 'Twas the Orthodox
minister, and he's pretty strict, too, but you heard him say that the
judge was one of the best men in Ostable County. Yet he never went to
meetin' what you'd call reg'lar and he did cuss consider'ble. He did
now, didn't he, Cap'n Sears?"

Sears nodded. He was thinking and paying little attention to the Cahoon
moralizing.

"Um-hm," went on Judah. "He sartin did. He never said 'sugar' when he
meant 'damn.' But I don't know, I cal'late I'd ruther been sworn at by
Judge Knowles than had a blessin' said over me by some others in these
latitudes. The judge's cussin' would have been honest, anyhow. And he
never put one of them swear words in the wrong place. They was always
just where they belonged; even when he swore at me I always agreed with
him."

Feeling, somehow, that the