42. ENGLISH JACK
Some months ago, I purchased some American postcards of English Jack, the Hermit of the White Mountains, New Hampshire, in front of his bucolic hermitage. It turned out that Jack was something of a local celebrity: when he died in 1912, allegedly at the age of 90, the published his obituary. For years, he had lived alone in his ramshackle shed, which he called his ‘ship’. An unkempt-looking, whitebearded old man, he was known
