Out of the ample fund of his experience, flavored and garnished by the rich and inexhaustible fertility of an imagination, that at times was almost uncanny, had come tales of early life on the river and marshes that had enthralled the loiterers at the store. They shared the shade of the awning with him during the hot summer days, and surrounded the big bellied wood stove in the dingy interior during the winter days and evenings when “they was nothin’ doin’” anywhere else in the region, and listened with rapt interest to his reminiscences. Any expression of incredulity met with crushing rebuke. “I didn’t notice that you was there at the time,” he would remark with asperity. “If you wasn’t, that’ll be all from you.” The muskrat colonies still left along the river, and out on the marshy areas, were often drawn upon by adventurous youngsters, solely for the purpose of “seein’ Bill skin ’em.” Clusters of the unfortunates were brought by their tails and laid on the store platform. The old man would look the crowd over patronizingly, take his “ripper” from his pocket, and, with a few dexterous strokes, perform feats of pelt surgery that made the tyros gasp with admiration. “I skun six hundred an’ forty-eight rats once’t, in five hours, that I’d caught on Muckshaw Lake the night before,” was Bill’s invariable remark after he had finished his grewsome performance. The adulation of these small audiences was the glow that illumined his declining days. When I first met the old man years ago, he was engaged in writing his autobiography, and at last accounts he was still at it. His shack and the little room over the store had gradually become literary temples. His complicated manuscripts and notes were kept in an old black satchel of once shiny oil cloth, that he called his “war bag.” On its side was the roughly lettered inscription: “HISTORIC CRONICELS—STILES.” He carried it back and forth between his abodes with much solicitude. During the many evenings I spent with him, he would frequently extract its contents and read aloud in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. He often paused and looked over the rims of his spectacles, with animation in his gray eyes, when he came to passages that he deemed of special importance. The masses of foolscap contained records that were only intelligible to the writer. His grammar and spelling were hopelessly bad, his methods of compilation were baffling, and his penmanship was mystic, but his collection of facts and near-facts was prodigious. He took long reflective rests between the periods of active composition. They were deathless chronicles in the sense that they seemed to be without end, and they appeared to become more and more deathless as he proceeded.