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 by a grizzled moustache moulded for the precise formation that emphasizes such syllables as el, the hooked nose and sallow cheeks, the grizzled brows and grey eyes drawn down at the corners.  But for all its ancestral strength of feature, it was a face from which will had been extracted, and lacked the fire and fanaticism, the indomitable hardness it should have proclaimed, and which have been so characteristically embodied in Mr. St. Gaudens’s statue of the Puritan.  His clothes were slightly shabby, but always neat.

Little as one might have guessed it, however, what may be called a certain transmuted enthusiasm was alive in him.  He had a hobby almost amounting to an obsession, not uncommon amongst Americans who have slipped downward in the social scale.  It was the Bumpus Family in America.  He collected documents about his ancestors and relations, he wrote letters with a fine, painful penmanship on a ruled block he bought at Hartshorne’s drug store to distant Bumpuses in Kansas and Illinois and Michigan, common descendants of Ebenezer, the original immigrant, of Dolton.  Many of these western kinsmen answered:  not so the magisterial Bumpus who lived in Boston on the water side of Beacon, whom likewise he had ventured to address,—­to the indignation and disgust of his elder daughter, Janet.