howitzer.  He was secretly and justly proud of saving his captain’s life and of bringing off that “cursed nice little cannon.”  He gloried over it many a time to himself, and often of late took the medal of honor from its imitation-morocco case, and read the inscription by the light of his flickering candle.  The embossed silver words seemed to spread a lambent glow over all the squalid little cabin—­seemed almost to set it on fire!  More than once some irrepressible small boy, prowling at night in the neighborhood and drawn like a moth by the flame of Dutton’s candle, had set his eye to a crack in the door-panel and seen the shoemaker sitting on the edge of his bed with the medal in his hand.

Until within a year or eighteen months, Dutton had regularly attended the Sunday morning service at the Old Brick Church.  One service was all he could manage, for it was difficult for him to mount the steep staircase leading to his seat in the gallery.  That his attendance slackened and finally ceased altogether, he tried, in his own mind, to attribute to this difficulty, and not to the fact that his best suit had become so threadbare as to make him ashamed; though the congregation now seldom glanced up, as it used to do, at the organ-loft where he sat separated from the choir by a low green curtain.  Thus he had on his hands the whole unemployed day, with no break in its monotony; and it often seemed interminable.  The Puritan Sabbath as it then existed was not a thing to be trifled with.  All temporal affairs were sternly set aside; earth came to a standstill.  Dutton, however, conceived the plan of writing down in a little blank-book the events of his life.  The task would occupy and divert him, and be no flagrant sin.  But there had been no events in his life until the one great event; so his autobiography resolved itself into a single line on the first page—­

     Sept. 13, 1847.  Had my leg shot off.

What else was there to record, except a transient gleam of sunshine immediately after his return home, and his present helplessness and isolation?

It was one morning at the close of a particularly bitter December.  The river-shore was sheathed in thicker ice than had been known for twenty years.  The cold snap, with its freaks among water-pipes and window-glass and straw-bedded roots in front gardens, was a thing that was to be remembered and commented on for twenty years to come.  All natural phenomena have a curious attraction for persons who live in small towns and villages.  The weathercock on the spire and the barometer on the back piazza are studied as they are not studied by dwellers in cities.  A habit of keen observation of trivial matters becomes second nature in rural places.  The provincial eye grows as sharp as the woodsman’s.  Thus it happened that somebody passing casually through Nutter’s Lane that morning noticed—­noticed it as a thing of course, since it was so—­that no smoke was coming out of Dutton’s chimney.