"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?"