Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/234

 Imagine an old stooped sailorman coming into Port Derby one summer day in the late 'nineties, with brass rings in his ears and dusty to the waist with walking. Imagine him as bald as a toad—not a hair on his face, not an eyelash, not a bristle—and his scalp as bare as a dried mushroom below the sun-greened cloth cap that he wore on his skull-top. Imagine him wind-cured, sea-scalded, storm-toughened, wrinkling up his forehead to open his eyes, working his lips in a toothless mumble, shuffling along the road with the dust puffing up under his feet, and looking altogether like an old tortoise that had been driven out into the glare of the highway in search of a new "crawl."

And imagine Port Derby a mere cluster of houses at the mouth of Catfish Creek, with orchards and corn-fields behind them, a rotting wharf at the water's edge, some boats drawn up on the sands, and a number of great pound nets, raised on poles in a shore meadow, waiting to be mended. Imagine the little village lying in a hollow so quiet and so hidden that the hills of the shore-line seemed to cuddle it in the crook of an arm, with a haze veiling it against the midday sun and all Lake Erie glittering before it and all Lake Erie's little waves rustling quietly on the beach shingle.

Imagine such a weary old tramp, in the blazing heat of the hill road, looking down on such a peace-