In the way of old countrymen who knew their boundaries, he was tough and unforgiving in his role of landowner. He had his rights, “By gawly!” and he would know when someone did him wrong. He held on hard, and I suspect there were neighbors who felt the possessiveness too strongly, but this being none of my business, I will go in and get my hair cut. The shop, with a tool shed under the same roof, where “Nate” used to grind knives and axes, stood, and still stands, across the yard from the house where he was born. There are some other gray-shingled, outlying buildings on both sides of a dirt road that runs through scrubby woods and hollows, dry hills sloping down to marshy bottom land ... wood-lot country. One December day I rapped at the door, and he put his jacket on and walked across the yard with me, where two white ducks were parading and some red chickens giving the frozen ground a going over. The old man bent down a little and spoke to his dog Bonnie, a cream-colored spaniel, which had just wagged up to him: “Did you get it?” Then, to me: “I lost an egg. Picked up five eggs, out of the hen yard this mornin’, and came back with four. Maybe there was a hole in these old pants of mine.” The barber shop was small, long and narrow, but he had a stove in there that kept it warm. There were some old magazines on a bench against the wall, with a black Homburg hat hanging on a peg. It had been given him by an old customer, a wealthy man who had lived on the Cape during the summer and had come in to have his hair cut for many years before he died. There was a photograph on the wall of the two of them with an inscription underneath that read: “Established 1884. A satisfied customer is our best advertisement.” They were standing out in front of the shop, smiling in the sun. “Feller came here yesterday and I had to clip him in the kitchen. Shop was too cold,” Nate said. The calm of the place was comforting. It came, I suppose, from an acceptance that emanated from him, and brought in many old friends, who would sit down to say: “Nate, just thought I’d come over and pass the time of day.” Whatever he had to say about other people never left them without the honor of human circumstances. “Pretty close, he is,” he would say with a little laugh, or “I guess he had a shade on” (a Cape Cod expression for being drunk). “Guess you can’t hold on to nothin’,” he said about some local theft, in a way that insisted on not being roused beyond necessity.