But our Brother Alburtus was always a puzzle to me as, indeed, he was a great mystery to the rest of the Brotherhood and Sisterhood, though we all were regarded as peculiar by outsiders. He was very tall, even taller than I, and broad-shouldered, so that even with his habit of walking humbly, with bowed form, he yet towered a veritable giant above all the rest of the Brotherhood. A pronounced roll in his gait, such as men receive who have served long on the sea, inclined many of us to believe such had been the greater part of his life, and there were rumors current in the neighborhood that our Brother Alburtus had been captain of a vessel; while still others--especially the busybodies, who always imagine evil of others--gravely asserted he had been a pirate and had sought refuge among us from those who sought his capture; but the only thing I ever saw as supporting the charge of piracy was a long, livid scar across our brother's brow, giving his otherwise gentle and benign countenance a rather forbidding aspect. Whether or not he had been a rover of the seas I never learned; from his face I could not believe he had been a bloodthirsty pirate, though I know full well that oft beneath the form and features of a saint dwell the thoughts and passions of the Evil One; for the Scriptures say the human heart is a deceitful thing. But this I do know, and in later years it was a great comfort to me, that in all the twenty or more years our brother was with us he lived a life of such saintly peace and gentleness as put to shame many a Brother who professed more but acted not so well. Whatever his past life, I felt sure with us he lived a true Christian; for a man cannot well live a hypocrite long with his fellow-men and not be found out. Yet he had two great peculiarities we often marveled at and of which one was, that no matter where or when one saw him, he would ever be clasping and rubbing his hands together. Day after day, month after month, year after year, all the time I knew him, I believe I never saw him but that he was clasping and rubbing those hands and looking at them in a strange, abstracted sort of way, and even when the Brotherhood were at their meals, if he was not attending to the needs of the inner man, he would be still rubbing and clasping those hands, which looked white and peaceful enough to me, so far as I could see; but the suspicious ones--and they are ever a plenty--in our community and in the country round about were firm in the belief that those hands had been stained with the blood of men and even fair women and dear little children, and for whose deaths he was doomed for the rest of his life to imagine he saw the blood there which he must ever be trying to rub off. Mine own opinion was that our Brother Alburtus, who was one of those absent-minded ones who never know what they are doing, had simply fallen into this habit, which, as is the nature of habits, became a very part of him.