“There’s no chance for you in the law,” said Mr. Shackford, after a long pause.  “Sharpe’s nephew has the berth.  A while ago I might have got you into the Miantowona Iron Works; but the rascally directors are trying to ruin me now.  There’s the Union Store, if they happen to want a clerk.  I suppose you would be about as handy behind a counter as a hippopotamus.  I have no business of my own to train you to.  You are not good for the sea, and the sea has probably spoiled you for anything else.  A drop of salt water just poisons a landsman.  I am sure I don’t know what to do with you.”

“Don’t bother yourself about it at all,” said Richard, cheerfully.  “You are going back on the whole family, ancestors and posterity, by suggesting that I can’t make my own living.  I only want a little time to take breath, don’t you see, and a crust and a bed for a few days, such as you might give any wayfarer.  Meanwhile, I will look after things around the place.  I fancy I was never an idler here since the day I learnt to split kindling.”

“There’s your old bed in the north chamber,” said Mr. Shackford, wrinkling his forehead helplessly.  “According to my notion, it is not so good as a bunk, or a hammock slung in a tidy forecastle, but it’s at your service, and Mrs. Morganson, I dare say, can lay an extra plate at table.”

With which gracious acceptance of Richard’s proposition, Mr. Shackford resumed his way upstairs, and the young man thoughtfully descended to the hall-door and thence into the street, to take a general survey of the commercial capabilities of Stillwater.

The outlook was not inspiring.  A machinist, or a mechanic, or a day laborer might have found a foot-hold.  A man without handicraft was not in request in Stillwater.  “What is your trade?” was the staggering question that met Richard at the threshold.  He went from workshop to workshop, confidently and cheerfully at first, whistling softly between whiles; but at every turn the question confronted him.  In some places, where he was recognized with thinly veiled surprise as that boy of Shackford’s, he was kindly put off; in others he received only a stare or a brutal No.

By noon he had exhausted the leading shops and offices in the village, and was so disheartened that he began to dread the thought of returning home to dinner.  Clearly, he was a superfluous person in Stillwater.  A mortar-splashed hod-carrier, who had seated himself on a pile of brick and was eating his noonday rations from a tin can just brought to him by a slatternly girl, gave Richard a spasm of envy.  Here was a man who had found his place, and was establishing—­what Richard did not seem able to establish in his own case—­a right to exist.