It was at one of these festivities that he first met Charity Hallet, called in those days Cheery from her disposition that fairly bubbled over with happiness. A fiery sort of wooing followed; that is, fiery and unusual for a staid New England town, where sitting evening after evening by the best room lamp or “buggy dashing” through the wild lanes of a moonlight night or of a Sunday afternoon were considered the only legitimate means of expression. Alack! this man possessed neither horse nor buggy, or the means of hiring one, and the door of the Hallets’ best room was closed to him, as well as every other door of the house. What would you have? Swift dances snatched when some one else relieved the fiddler; meetings by stealth in the woods, intricate journeys through the winding marsh watercourses where, hidden by tall reeds, a duck boat slipped in and out, holding a half-anxious, half-happy girl, while a tall, bronzed youth either poled the craft along or sometimes pushed it as he strode beside it waist deep in water, his eyes fixed upon the merry ones beside him. Of course discovery came at last, and Charity’s father sent her to spend a winter with an aunt in another State and “finish” school there. Meanwhile for half a dozen years the youth followed the sea and on his return found Charity an orphan in possession of the house and a snug income, and though she was still unmarried, a vein of prudence or a change of heart, just as one happens to view it, had at least diluted her romance. “Get some employment with a name to it; I couldn’t stand an idle man hanging about,” she had said when man and dog (there had always been and always would be a dog following at this man’s heels) for the first time entered the Hallet front door and prepared, without ceremony, to resume the boy and girl footing as a matter of course. The man, of primitive instincts and no responsibility, had looked at her dumbly for a minute, and then the light of her meaning breaking upon him he jumped to his feet and bringing his heels sharply together, said, “I thought you were fond o’ me, Cheery, and that women sort o’ liked somebody they were fond of hanging around ’em,” and without further ado he called the dog, and closing door and gate carefully behind him, turned from the village street to the shore road with easy, swinging gait; but from that day his fiddle never played for the village dancers.