The State legislature had recognised his modest but just reputation as one of the best-grounded “straight” lawyers in the State, and on the recommendation of the judges had selected him as the reviser of the statutes, a labour that he found exacting and absorbing. Then on the heels of this work came a syndicate with a scheme for helping municipalities to instal and own their own water plants, despite the statutory restrictions that allow towns to assume so much debt and no more. The syndicate had heard of the Squire’s legal invention of “water districts” that he had studied out in the dumbly approving presence of his “Creosote Supreme Court” and expounded to the amazement of lawyers who studied for a while and then accepted. And the syndicate would not listen to a nay and laid a certified check in his hands of a size that would have caused Asa Brickett to swoon had he realised that so large a consideration had passed over his head, and on the first warming days of March thousands of picks and shovels were ready to follow Squire Phineas Look when he had brushed away the last tangle of litigation. Uncle Buck had passed the necessary word among the veteran loafers who used to occupy the lawyer’s shaky chairs. “He’s busier’n a yaller dog with a tin can of snap-crackers tied to his tail, and he don’t want nobody up there unless they come on straight bus’ness.” So all day long, whether the snow beat against the panes or the sun shone warm upon his broad back down through the bare elms, the Squire sat at his big table, his pen busy, scratchity-scratch, or his eyebrows frowning above some volume of reports, his old dog Eli curled on the dusty floor at his feet. And the only ones who stamped up the slippery outside stairs were those who came on business. It was on business that Judge Collamore Willard came one snowy, blowy day in March, the wind whipping his cloak about his skinny legs as he toiled up the stairs leading to Squire Phin’s office. He came in with the gust casting a last handful of snow at his back, as a roguish youth snowballs a figure that is aged and eccentric. It _was_ a queer figure that sat slowly down in one of the Squire’s chairs, unwrapping fold on fold of a huge shawl that was coiled about his head and long, thin neck. He had pulled the mitten from one of his hands and the gaunt phalanges looked like a bundle of reeds tied together by skin-strips. The skin was speckled with the brown spots of age and the hand fluttered as it tugged at the shawl. The Squire put his knees against the edge of the table, sat back in his chair, and poised his pen in silent amazement for a moment. Then he pointed the pen at the stove. “Better sit close, Judge,” he admonished. “The draughts get to sky-larking through here pretty lively on windy days.”