Mystery Of A Maine Island

"Some years ago, up at North Haven Island, os the Maine coast," said a New Yorker, "I carne Etcross a mystery that haunts me still. A bare rocky point juts out into the sea on one side of the island, and the first year that I visited the place there was a rude cabin on the rock. Having gone out there from curioslty one day, I found a man in shameful rags trying out the oil from the refuse of a fish-canning actory. When I carne to examine the man his appearance astonished me. He was an extremely handsome, well-made Engüshman of forty or thereabouU. His hands, soiled with the material he worked in, were small and well-shaped. When I tried to draw him into conversation, he first answered in monosylla3les, and was almost sulky in his reserve. He gradual ly thawed, ho wever, and I found that he spoke rare and beautiful English, and that of a wellbred and well-read man. Glancing into the door of his cabin, I could see perlaps a score of well-thumbed volumes in library binding. His reserve was such that I could not ask him about himself, but I left the island deeply interested in bim." "I turned up at North Haven the next year, and one of the earliest things I did was to go out to the point in search of my acquaintance. The rock was bare again, and there was no trace of him and hia cottage. I asked about tiim of some persons I met on the island, and here is what I learned: He had come to the place mysteriously some years before, having been dropped by a schooner. He found work at the fish cannery, but later quit the place, built his cabin on the rock, supplied himself with food chiefly by fishing and obtained from the factory the privilege of trying oil from the refuse. From the producís he obtained a little ready money for tobáceo and other luxuries. At some time between my two visits his cabin was discovered to be on flre late one night, and, hurrying down, his neighbors saw him amid the flames dead, with his throat cut. The ftre had so seized upon the hut that his body could not be removed until It was nearly consumed. He was buried, and no solution of the mystery discovered. Life had ev.idently become insupportable to him, aad he had taken the way of suicide as the easiest one out of misery."