he turned and addressed them thus:  “Let me to my peace, gentlemen, for I am no fool.  And if you be good and honest men, disturb not the peace of the community in this manner, but get to your homes; and if you cannot comfort your families, give what you can to the poor, and heaven will forgive you for your follies.”  Indeed, so firmly was he resolved to wash his hands of the world that no force of argument could have induced him to call upon Glenmoregain, whom he felt in his heart would be grievously disappointed that he had not returned with his pockets stuffed full of kingdoms.

And now, at early dawn of a November morning, a short, fat man, in tight-fitting garments and the hat of a priest, might have been seen stepping from on board a small schooner just arrived at Barnstable.  His face was covered with a thick, coarse beard, his countenance wore a dejected air, and his raiment, if the hat be excepted, was shabby enough for a professional mountebank out of business.  A chilly wind and a drizzling rain filled the heavens with gloom; mist-clouds rolled over the land; a gray fog trailed lazily along the harbor; the scudding clouds vaulted along the heavens as if driven by the furies; and, indeed, the drenched earth was bespread with a pall of gloom.

The dejected man-for such he seemed-adjusted the little bundle under his arm, looked confusedly upon each object that met his eye, and then picked his way, shivering, over the muddy road into the outskirts of the town, which was yet in a sound sleep.  He was soon wet to the skin, and the great rain-drops that fell from his broad-brimmed hat added to the forlornness of his condition.  The ducks by the roadside ran to their ponds quacking as he approached; and even the geese seemed to pity his condition, for they awoke to gabble him out a salutation, and having shook their feathers, they would sail in the same direction, so long as there was water, and then take leave of him with a loud gabbling.  But this homage brought him no consolation:  indeed, the bleak earth seemed sending a deeper chill to his heart; and the brown leaf that hung twirling and dripping from the almost naked tree by the roadside, invested his feelings with a deeper melancholy, for in it he read the sorrows of a dead summer.

Halting at the door of a little house, the roof overgrown with black moss, the windows filled with rags, and poverty written upon every shingle, he stood for several seconds hesitating and shivering.  Now he fixed his eyes upon the ground and seemed giving his thoughts to the music of the rain-drops; now he turned his eyes sorrowfully upward, as if contemplating the driving clouds.  And while I assert that not even the most keen-eyed observer of human things would have detected in this forlorn sojourner a professional warrior returning from the scene of endless victories, and now out of business, the reader, I am sure, will not be surprised when I inform him that this drenched traveler was no less a person than General Roger Sherman Potter, commonly called Roger Potter, the like of whose exploits modern history bears no record.