“Jehiel's schooner got ashore on the bar, years ago,” said Susan, “and yet they towed her off, and I saw her this morning, from my chamber window, before sunrise, all sail set, going by to the eastward.”
“I know what you mean,” said Eph. “But here—I got mad once, and I almost had a right to, and I can't get started again; I never shall. I can get a living, of course; but I shall always be pointed out as a jailbird, and could no more get any footing in the world than Portuguese Jim.”
Portuguese Jim was the sole professional criminal of the town,—a weak, good-natured, knock-kneed vagabond, who stole hens, and spent every winter in the House of Correction as an “idle and disorderly person.”
Susan laughed outright at the picture. Eph smiled too, but a little bitterly.
“I suppose it was more ugliness than anything else,” he said, “that made me come back here to live, where everybody knows I 've been in jail and is down on me.”
“They are not down on you,” said Susan. “Nobody is down on you. It 's all your own imagination. And if you had gone anywhere that you was a stranger, you know that the first thing that you would have done would have been to call a meeting and tell all the people that you had burned down a man's barn and been in the State's-prison, and that you wanted them all to know it at the start; and you wouldn't have told them why you did it, and how young you was then, and how Eliphalet treated your mother, and how you was going to pay him for all he lost Here, everybody knows that side of it. In fact,” she added, with a little twinkle in her eye, “I have sometimes had an idea that the main thing they don't like is, to see you saving every cent to pay to Eliphalet.”
“And yet it was on your say that I took up that plan,” said Eph. “I never thought of it till you asked me when I was going to begin to pay him up.”
“And you ought to,” said Susan. “He has a right to the money—and then, you don't want to be under obligations to that man all your life. Now, what you want to do is to cheer up and go around among folks. Why, now you 're the only fish-buyer there is that the men don't watch when he 's weighing their fish. You'll own up to that, for one thing, won't you?”
“Well, they are good fellows that bring fish to me,” he said.
“They were n't good fellows when they traded at the great wharf,” said Susan. “They had a quarrel down there once a week, regularly.”