Down in a little hut, by the bay-side, lived the village ne’er-do-weel; this was a year ago. He was not an old man in action, but at times he looked more than his fifty odd years, for life had dealt grudgingly with his primitive tastes, and besides being well weathered by an outdoor life, both eyes and gait had the droop of the man of middle age who, lacking good food, has made up for it by bad drink. Yet, in spite of a general air of shiftlessness, there was that about him still that told that he had once not only been nearly handsome, but had been possessed of a certain wild gypsy fascination coupled with a knack with the violin that had turned the heads, as well as the feet, of at least two of the village lassies of his day who, though rigidly brought up, had eyes and ears for something beyond the eternal sowings, hoeings, reapings, and sleepings of farm life. Even in his boyhood he was looked upon as a detrimental, until, partly on the principle of “Give a dog a bad name and he will earn it,” he absolutely earned one by default, so to speak, for the things that he left undone, rather than deeds committed. He was side-branched from thrifty country stock; his father, a proxy farmer and the captain of a coastwise lumber schooner, had on a northbound trip married a comely Canadian-French woman, half-breed it was whispered, who was possessed of the desire for liberty and the outdoor life, far beyond her desire to observe the village _p_’s and _q_’s. This new strain in the cool New England blood caused neighbourly bickerings, bred mischief, and had finally made the only child of the marriage a strolling vagabond, who instinctively shunned the inside of a schoolhouse, as a rat does a trap. So that after his mother died when he was sixteen, all his after days he had lived in the open by rod and gun, fish-net and clam fork, berry picking, or playing his fiddle at village picnics and other festivals.