He lit up again, and then settled himself snugly between the edge of the table and his bunk-board, after the manner of a man who is in for a long sitting-out. Once he really started there were but few interruptions. The loss of the _Cromwell_ was a serious affair, and nobody broke in thoughtlessly; and only when Martin would stop to refill his pipe, or to light up again when he found he had let it go out, did he make any halt himself. * * * * * “What the Hoodleys of Cape Ann were, and are still,” began Martin, “of course all of you, or most all of you, anyway, know. Or maybe some of you don’t know. Well, they were a hard crowd--but didn’t know it--the kind of people that whenever they got to talking about their own kind, never had any tales to prove maybe that there was even the lightest bit of wit or grace or beauty among them; no, none of that for the Hoodleys of Cape Ann. But to show you what thrifty, hard-headed fore-people they had, they could spin off, any of ’em, a hundred little yarns, almost any day, as if anybody on earth that knew those of them that were alive would ever doubt what the dead-and-gone ones must’ve been. Hard they were--even neighbors that didn’t take life as a dream of poetry said that much of them. Hard they were--man, yes--the kind that little children never toddled up to and climbed on to their knees, nor a man in hard luck by any mistake ever asked the loan of a dollar of--the kind that never a man walked across the street to shake hands with. That’s the kind they were. Take ’em all in all, I guess that the Hoodleys were about as hard a tribe as you’d find in all Essex County--surely ’tisn’t possible there were any harder. And yet you couldn’t pick a flaw in ’em before the law. They were honest. Everybody had to say that for them--paying their debts, their just debts--as they put it themselves--and collecting their own dues, don’t fear, and a great respect for the letter of the law--for the letter of it. And I mind they used to boast that for generations their people had kept clear of the poorhouses, and that all had been church-members in good standing. Well, not exactly all; for, to be exact and truthful--they themselves used to put it that way--there was one here and there that had broken away. But such had been rare, as one of them--a strong church-member--used to put it, and the devil is ever active; and speaking of the devil, this particular member’d go on, there is always the blistering pit for the unrighteous. That last I s’pose he thought he ought to put in, because everybody knew that of all the people that fell from grace, the wickedest, the most blasphemous, the most evil of all evil livers had been those of the Hoodleys that had back-slided. Once they went to the bad they cert’nly went beyond all hope; and nobody did they curse out more furiously than their own people every time they did start in.