“Oh, no,” I said quickly. “He had most of them left, and he didn’t sell any more. We must have been the only people who bought any.”

“What did I tell you?” my mother said, not taking her eyes from the apples. “God help him, it would break your heart to see him standing there with his old hat in his hand.”

“A half a dozen would have been enough,” my uncle said amiably. “Now you’ve encouraged him, he’ll be on your back the rest of your life. Isn’t that so, Maeve?”

“Like the Old Man of the Sea,” I said, but they paid no attention to me.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” my mother said to my uncle, “always thinking the worst of everybody. This is the first time I ever laid eyes on him, and I’d be very much surprised if he ever turns up here again. It’s not worth it to him, dragging that big basket around from door to door.”

I was thinking of the old man who had attached himself to Sindbad the Sailor. I was thinking how helpless and frail the old man had looked when Sindbad first encountered him, and how, after Sindbad took him on his back to carry him, the old man grew heavier and heavier and stronger and stronger, until, when it was too late, Sindbad began to hate him. It was a story that had fascinated me, especially the description of the old man’s cruel, talonlike hands and the way they dug into Sindbad’s shoulders.

On the following Thursday, the old apple man again appeared at our door, at the same time in the afternoon. When my mother opened the door, he was standing as before, with his battered hat in his hand and his thin shoulders stooped and the basket of apples beside him, but this time on top of the basket were balanced two large brown paper bags, full of apples. He bent over painfully, lifted the bags, and offered them to my mother, saying something we did not understand. He had to repeat it twice before we caught it. “A dozen of each,” he was saying.

My mother started to speak but changed her mind, turned away, got the money, paid him, and took the apples. I stood at the door and stared at him, hoping to catch in his faded eyes a glimpse of the villainy that had possessed the old sinner Sindbad found on the beach, but this old man seemed to have no sight at all. Again I watched him from the front sitting-room window, and then I joined my mother in the kitchen.

“He didn’t go near any of the other houses,” I announced. “I suppose he was afraid they wouldn’t buy any.”