So they dubbed him “Shoe-peg,” or “Shoop” for brevity. There are others among his neighbors who would furnish an inexhaustible source of study to the student of character. There’s old Rufus Fairchild, known as “Roof,” a rotund specimen of rural jollity, his round face set in dishevelled locks of gray, with a twinkle in his eye and a good word for everybody. And there’s Father Tomlinson, who keeps the post-office down by the dam, as genial an old fellow as ever wrapped up his throat in a white stock. And I might almost continue the list indefinitely. But there is one I must especially mention; and, now that I think of it, he really should have headed the list, for he stands alone--or at least he does _sometimes_. If you are in search of the embodiment of typical Erin, you need go no farther; here he is. This individual represents another nationality which swells the population of Hometown--the hard-working laborers who toil in the great factory down in the glen, called “Satan’s Misery.” The above personage is one of the best-hearted creatures in the town; but it is the old story, and the world to him is enclosed in the compass of a barrel-hoop. When last I saw him he was in an evident decline, but as I put my finger on his wrist I could still feel the pulsations of the whiskey coursing through his veins. “Look here, my good fellow,” I said to him one day, “why don’t you taper off a little? If you keep on in this way, you’ll be in your grave in less than a month. How would you like that?” “Arrah, begorra,” he replied, with a look of hopeful resignation, “if I cud awnly be shure o’ me gude skvare dthrink in the other wurrld, oi wudn’t moind.” The record of a single evening spent in the village store, with its rural jargon and homespun yarns, its odd vernacular and rustic gossip, would make a volume as rare and unique as the characters it would depict. The store itself is a matchless picture in its way, and for variety in accessory is as rich as could be wished for. The low, murky ceiling, hung with all manner of earthly goods--scythes and rakes, boots and pails, in pendulous array; bottles and boxes, brooms and breast-pins, are here--in short, everything that heart could wish or thought suggest, from speckled calicoes to seven-cent sugar, or from a three-tined fork to a goose-yoke. Evening after evening, for an hour or so, I was tempted thither, until I found the week had gone. Sunday came again--Sunday in New England. The old bell swung on its wheel in the belfry, ringing out its call to devotion, and ere the echo had died in the recesses of the mountain beyond the still atmosphere reverberated with an answering peal from the little sister church in the valley below, as the scattered groups with strolling steps wend their way to “meeting,” and the gay loads from Newborough go flitting by on the accustomed Sunday drive.