One winter evening I discovered, a few miles from the village, one of this class:  he was, on the whole, the strangest human being whom it has ever been my fortune to meet.  About dusk I found myself some distance away from the village, near the great bridge that spans the river where it debouches into the sea.  The water was heaving in long, slow swells.  A deep silence had fallen over the earth.  The evening red was reflected in the sea in rich blood dye, while the colored lights of the bridge and the lighthouse glowed and burned in the deep, here writhing along the waves like long golden and crimson sea-serpents, and there shooting down long streamers of light into the waves, to serve, I fancied, as hanging lamps for that vast black, star-bespangled abyss of the sky, that weird sunken dome, that inverted world, over which the water lay stretched out like thin, translucent red glass, and to look down into whose immeasurable and dizzy depths thrilled me both with pleasure and a kind of terror—­that vague feeling of pain which the sublime always excites in the mind.

I crossed the bridge and wandered along the opposite side of the river by a lonely path.  Suddenly I saw smoke curling up from a small recess of the beach.  It was a full mile from any human habitation known to me, and I hesitated for a moment about advancing upon such a place at dusk, especially as the winter was one of the gloomiest in the period of our long financial depression.  However, I decided to go on.  Several overturned fishing-boats lay upon the beach, with a net drying upon one of them.  A few clamshells were scattered about, and near the door of a small cabin lay a pile of split kindlings.  The cabin was considerably smaller in size than an English railway-carriage, and nestled under the overhanging bank of the river.  No human being was visible at first.  But presently I detected by the red glow of his pipe a man in the interior of the cabin.  I sat down on a boat, not venturing to approach nearer and beard the old lion in his lair.  But on his inviting me to come in I went up to the door.  It was, however, only a meaningless form of speech that led him to say “Come in,” for it would hardly have been possible to get into a cabin only five feet wide, with the man himself sitting by a large rusty stove right over against the door.  He placed a bootjack in the doorway for me to sit down upon.  There was no window in the cabin.  Firkins of fish were piled up along the sides of the interior, and in the dim background I saw a rude framework covered with straw which served as a bed.

And now for the human being there.  The most noticeable peculiarity about the strange old hermit was an enormous wen which hung down from the front part of his neck.  This wen was fully as large as a man’s head.  Long yellow hair hung over his shoulders, and a huge red beard reached to the middle of his breast—­

  His beard a foot before him, and his hair
  A yard behind.