Into the village there came, late one autumn afternoon, a tall man, who was travelling on foot, with a small valise hanging from his shoulder.  He had inquired for lodging for the night, had been directed to the blacksmith’s house, had arranged to stop there, had had his supper, which greatly satisfied him, and was now sitting before the fire in the large livingroom, smoking blacksmith Fryker’s biggest pipe.

This stranger was a red-haired man, with a cheery expression, and a pair of quick, bright eyes.  He was slenderly but strongly built, and was a good fellow, who would stand by, with his hands in the pockets of his short pea-jacket, and right willingly tell one who was doing something how the thing ought to be done.

But the traveller did not sit alone before the crackling fire of logs, for the night being cool, a table was drawn near to one side of the fire-place, and by this sat Mistress Fryker and her daughter Joanna, both engaged in some sort of needle-work.  The blacksmith sat between the corner of the fire-place and this table, so that when he had finished smoking his after-supper pipe, he might put on his spectacles and read the weekly paper by the light of the big lamp.  On the other side of the stranger, whose chair was in front of the middle of the fire-place, sat the school-master, Andrew Cardly by name; a middle-aged man of sober and attentive aspect, and very glad when chance threw in his way a book he had not read, or a stranger who could reinforce his stock of information.  At the other corner of the fire-place, in a cushioned chair, which was always given to him when he dropped in to spend an evening with the blacksmith, sat Mr. Harberry, an elderly man, a man of substance, and a man in whom all Riprock, not excluding himself, placed unqualified confidence as to his veracity, his financial soundness, and his deep insight into the causes, the influences, and the final issue of events and conditions.

“On a night like this,” said the stranger, stretching his long legs toward the blaze, “there is nothing I like better than a fire of wood, except indeed it be the society of ladies who do not object to a little tobacco smoke,” and he glanced with a smile toward the table with a lamp upon it.

Now blacksmith Fryker was a prudent man, and he did not consider that the privileges of his hearthstone—­always freely granted to a decent stranger—­included an acquaintance with his pretty daughter; and so, without allowing his women-folk a chance to enter into the conversation, he offered the stranger a different subject to hammer upon.

“In the lower country,” said he, “they don’t need fires as early in the season as we do.  What calling do you follow, sir?  Some kind of trade, perhaps?”

“No,” said the traveller, “I follow no trade; I follow the sea.”

At this the three men looked at him, as also the two women.  His appearance no more suggested that he was a seaman than the appearance of Mr. Harberry suggested that he was what the village of Riprock believed him to be.  “I should not have taken you for a sailor,” said the blacksmith.