They boxed up all his goods and kept them in case someone turned up looking for him, but I assume that never happened, for we kept it all. Napoleon must have come out of the box some time, for he ended up as a toy of my father’s. I still have the watch also. The traveller claimed to have acquired it on his continental adventures, though it was plainly English. It says as much on its face.

His story was that he had come from England – or some part of Great Britain, anyway – looking for a friend who had travelled ahead of him to join a family with a land grant in New Brunswick, somewhere outside Grand Falls. He had arrived by ship at Saint John and passed Grand Falls without luck weeks before arriving in Madawaska.

He was a musician – that was the other thing my grandfather knew about him. He had brought sheet music with him, whether from Saint John or Britain I cannot say. It was a new piece that became famous, very famous. A symphony by Beethoven, but it was new then.

I’m told that, before he died, our visitor was putting together a group of local players in an attempt to perform the work. Not the whole work, but a smaller version of it. The timber millers were building a barn, or starting to, felling and cutting the timber for it, and he was assisting with the milling of it. It was to be twice the size of anything around, an expansion of the business.

There is another story about him that I heard only once. My father and some friends talked it over one night while I was in my bed. I asked my father the next day, and another time or two, but he insisted that I must have heard it wrong, and there was no story. The way the story went, as I heard it that one time, a friend of the traveller arrived some time after the drowning, quite possibly the very friend our visitor was looking for. The friend came with his own sister. He was a carpenter and stayed to build the barn in the traveller’s memory. We got a much better barn for it. The friend and the sister stayed living in our community for some years until typhoid fever took them both. The friend had a fiddle with him, and he got together other people with instruments, and they all played the traveller’s sheet music at the thanksgiving for the barn. Which makes for a heartwarming finish to a melancholy tale, which is why I remembered it even though my father denied it, and even though I can’t put names to its characters. With the exception of one, perhaps.