"Is that all? Nothing else?" "He preaches now and then--not regularly," said Mr. Main. A-ha! I thought. A religionist! "A preacher is expected to set a good example," I said. "He ain't a regular preacher," said Mr. Main, rather quickly. "He's just kind of around in religious work." "What do you mean?" I asked curiously, not quite catching the import of this "around." "Well," answered the boat builder, "he don't take any money for what he does. He ain't got anything." "What does he live on then?" I persisted, still wondering at the significance of "around in religious work." "I don't know. He used to fish for a living. Fishes yet once in a while, I believe." "He makes models of yachts," put in one of the bystanders. "He sold the New Haven Road one for two hundred dollars here not long ago." A vision of a happy-go-lucky Jack-of-all-trades arose before me. A visionary--a theorist. "What else?" I asked, hoping to draw them out. "What makes you all think he is contented? What does he do that makes him so contented?" "Well," said Mr. Main, after a considerable pause and with much of sympathetic emphasis in his voice, "Charlie Potter is just a good man, that's all. That's why he's contented. He does as near as he can what he thinks he ought to by other people--poor people." "You won't find anybody with a kinder heart than Charlie Potter," put in the boat-builder. "That's the trouble with him, really. He's too good. He don't look after himself right, I say. A fellow has to look out for himself some in this world. If he don't, no one else will." "Right you are, Henry," echoed a truculent sea voice from somewhere. I was becoming both amused and interested, intensely so. "If he wasn't that way, he'd be a darned sight better off than he is," said a thirty-year-old helper, from a far corner of the room. "What makes you say that?" I queried. "Isn't it better to be kind-hearted and generous than not?" "It's all right to be kind-hearted and generous, but that ain't sayin' that you've got to give your last cent away and let your family go hungry." "Is that what Charlie Potter does?" "Well, no, maybe he don't, but he comes mighty near to it at times. He and his wife and his adopted children have been pretty close to it at times." You see, this was the center, nearly, for all village gossip and philosophic speculation, and many of the most important local problems, morally and intellectually speaking, were here thrashed put. "There's no doubt but that's where Charlie is wrong," put in old Mr. Main a little later. "He don't always stop to think of his family." "What did he ever do that struck you as being over-generous?" I asked of the young man who had spoken from the corner. "That's all right," he replied in a rather irritated and peevish tone; "I ain't going to go into details now, but there's people around here that hang on him, and that he's give to, that he hadn't orter."