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1 ou wouldn’t see anything special about Josiah Linden’s house if you
passed it on the road, which ran from town up to the small bluff
Ythat overlooked Allen’s Bay. A scrawny oak tree, gnarled and
twisted from years of catching the wind off the bay, sat in front, spoiling
what symmetry the old house ever had. The back side of the house looked
fairly formidable, especially the rounded corner that seemed for all the

world like the turret of a small castle. There were some nights, however,
when the moon was full or nearly so, that the corner of the house would
glow white against the darkness of the trees and shrubbery behind it and
take on an eerie glow.
2 Carol Jenkins didn’t know much about Mr. Linden, except that he was
one of the few black people in that area of Nova Scotia. The story about
him, mostly gathered from the lips of people curious about the old man, or
from American Revolutionary War buffs who knew that his ancestors could
have been among the ex-slaves who had sided with British, was that Mr.
Linden had been a merchant seaman most of his life. He wasn’t a big man,
and when he walked he shifted his weight more from side to side than
straight forward. He was lively, though, and always had a smile for whoever
was passing, and a slight wave of the hand. The first time Carol remembered
having seen Mr. Linden was in the hardware store, talking to a group of
young men about weather conditions in the Arctic.
3 “The cold can catch you when you’re not even thinking about it. It
caught me about thirty years ago and I lost a bit of my finger to frostbite,” he
had said, holding up his hand so that the small crowd could see where the
tip of the second finger of his left hand had been amputated.
4 “You must have been all over the world,” one of the onlookers had
remarked.
5 “The lure of seeing new places, different ways of life, has been almost
irresistible,” Mr. Linden had replied. “Now I collect stories about those
places. Pictures and books about the places I’ve been and places I’d still like
to go someday. I have more than two thousand books in my collection.”

6 Carol mentioned this story to her friend Peter, who dismissed the
idea at once.

formidable If something is formidable, it is a bit frightening but
also impressive because of its size or another special quality.

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