He beckoned to me apologetically and then, when the other had left, pointed to a chair. “I’m the Billerica antiquary,” he said. “The local historians all call on me with their problems. Seventy-five years old I am. That gives me a life expectancy of five years—and it would take fifty for me to do all the things I have to do. You came here to ask me about Sacco and Vanzetti. What do you want to know?” Without waiting for my answer he went on. “I don’t think the truth will ever be known. As to whether they did it or not, I don’t know and I’ve made a point of not trying to know. I tell you this, though. They weren’t criminal types. For a while I think I saw them as much as anyone. Sacco had a very winning way about him. Of course he was a more settled type, with a wife and family. Vanzetti reminded me of a trade-union leader. That rigid mentality. He once said to me that where he came from in Italy there was a castle above the town and one family living in it had been oppressing the ordinary people in the valley for eight hundred years. I told him that it wasn’t so in America, that a family scarcely lasted three generations here. He’d read a little, but he’d not digested it too well—an unstable, wandering type, paranoid at times. When I saw him once over in the Charlestown Prison he said to me, ‘I don’t deny the right of the state to execute a man, but they have no right to castrate me and make me a laughingstock.’” The doctor had known personally almost everyone connected with the case on both sides. Katzmann was to him lazy and incompetent, though he thought better of his assistant, Harold Williams. Judge Thayer he gave credit for honest intentions, but found him irascible, a snob, and obsessed with the idea that the Communists were just about to take over the United States. Governor Fuller was merely a successful automobile salesman. Thompson he respected, but felt that he had gone into the case merely for the fee. “I thought,” I said, making another stab at it, “that seeing Sacco and Vanzetti so closely, you might have formed some opinion as to their guilt or innocence.” “I feel,” he said, “as William James did about psychic phenomena. I just do not know.” When I left, he walked out with me through his back garden blooming with zinnias. “If you are interested,” he said finally, “I’ll try to find my files on Sacco and Vanzetti for you. There may be something there. I’ve had so many cases since that I can’t remember the details. But drop in when you’re by this way again.” Three weeks later he was dead. * * * * *