His origins were out of a kind of history of which there was very little left intact except himself. He once showed me a tintype of his mother, a handsome girl named Bridget Malady, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1862. His father, Timothy Black, was born in Yarmouth, on the Cape. At the age of ten he signed on as a cook aboard the packet which sailed between East Dennis and Boston, and seems to have spent a good deal of his life on intermittent voyages at sea. He was also in the butchering and slaughtering business with his two sons. In the autumn they used to butcher eighty-five hogs or more, at the rate of three a day. And in some rough but related way, Timothy Black started his son in the barbering business. Nate remembered how his father used to cut his hair in the kitchen, long before the Black Hills emporium was established: “I used to sit there while he was sort of pummeling at me on the back of the neck. By gol! I sure did cringe when he was chopping me with those women’s scissors.” While I, seventy or eighty years later, was sitting in the barber’s chair, getting more expert and calmer work done on me, I assembled a little of the past. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an expedition to the post office or the store took up a large part of the day. That was the time when you could hitch the horse up to a post and stop for a long chat, “having the capacity to waste time” as I heard a Texan phrase it about some of his countrymen in the western part of the state. People walked between their houses--there are foot paths still showing--on barren hills. They had small herds of cows that foraged on the sloping fields. Families used to picnic together by the ponds, and there were barn dances on Saturday nights, which were sometimes the occasion for a rip-roaring fight. I have heard it said that Nate Black was the strongest fighter in the region, when outraged beyond his normal patience, but he would reveal none of this prowess to me. The Black family also held dances in their kitchen. The father of the house played the violin. On such occasions they would have plum porridge suppers, or they served crackers, milk, and raisins, and sometimes hulled corn. He was of a piece with his surroundings. I think of many things he talked about while I was having my hair cut and they all meant the gray, sea-girded land, and a human closeness to it. I think of the deer that ate his beans, of his duck that was carried off by a fox, of foxes being reduced in population by the mange, of a watering place for horses by Cedar Pond in East Dennis (a beautiful pond with ranks of dark cedars backing it up, and now being encroached upon by house lots); and he talked about the big eels waiting to eat young herrin’ (or alewives) at the mouth of a pond, and of sounding the depths of Round Pond here in West Brewster.