One of Us

GROVER GIBBS in his day and strength was no doubt the head philosopher-king of Port William. His only competitor for that “position,” as Mr. Milo Settle called it, would have been Burley Coulter. But during

Burley’s often absences, for reasons known and unknown, from the Port William conversation, Grover would be faithfully present and presiding. He had not been elected, and he had no power. He presided by his presence, the excellence of his own talk and telling, and his insatiable relish of the wondrous world of Port

William and its never-failing supply of stories worth telling. His preference in subject matter, hardly rare among the philosophers, ran in general to the funny and in particular to the ridiculous.

Port William’s most productive source of the ridiculous was the prepotent tribe of Berlews, who, through several generations, had brought forth a succession of acts and exploits always surpassing the expectations of their most astute observers and historians. But there was also the even larger tribe of what Grover called the Ridiculers, whose entirely democratic membership extended to all who were qualified, including prominently himself.

It had been he, after all, who to make a drinking hole for his cows in a frozen pond, and not quite sober, had stood on the designated square of ice while he chopped all around it with his axe—a story that would have