On just such a street in the once thriving New England village of Dolton had Edward been born.  In Dolton Bumpus was once a name of names, rooted there since the seventeenth century, and if you had cared to listen he would have told you, in a dialect precise but colloquial, the history of a family that by right of priority and service should have been destined to inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see it delivered to the alien.  The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had been tried in the balance and found wanting.  Edward could never understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, had suddenly begun to move.  He had always been prudent, but in spite of youthful “advantages,” of an education, so called, from a sectarian college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence may prosper in a static world, it is a futile virtue in a dynamic one.  Experience even had been powerless to impress this upon him.  For more than twenty years after leaving college he had clung to a clerkship in a Dolton mercantile establishment before he felt justified in marrying Hannah, the daughter of Elmer Wench, when the mercantile establishment amalgamated with a rival—­and Edward’s services were no longer required.  During the succession of precarious places with decreasing salaries he had subsequently held a terrified sense of economic pressure had gradually crept over him, presently growing strong enough, after two girls had arrived, to compel the abridgment of the family ....It would be painful to record in detail the cracking-off process, the slipping into shale, the rolling, the ending up in Hampton, where Edward had now for some dozen years been keeper of one of the gates in the frowning brick wall bordering the canal,—­a position obtained for him by a compassionate but not too prudent childhood friend who had risen in life and knew the agent of the Chippering Mill, Mr. Claude Ditmar.  Thus had virtue failed to hold its own.

One might have thought in all these years he had sat within the gates staring at the brick row of the company’s boarding houses on the opposite bank of the canal that reflection might have brought a certain degree of enlightenment.  It was not so.  The fog of Edward’s bewilderment never cleared, and the unformed question was ever clamouring for an answer—­how had it happened?  Job’s cry.  How had it happened to an honest and virtuous man, the days of whose forebears had been long in the land which the Lord their God had given them?  Inherently American, though lacking the saving quality of push that had been the making of men like Ditmar, he never ceased to regard with resentment and distrust the hordes of foreigners trooping between the pillars, though he refrained from expressing these sentiments in public; a bent, broad shouldered, silent man of that unmistakable physiognomy which, in the seventeenth century, almost wholly deserted the old England for the new.  The ancestral features were there, the lips—­covered