The Depot Master

The stationmaster of a Cape Cod town — depot master, unofficial magistrate, and the only man everyone tells things to — is handed a runaway boy, a disputed will and a summer visitor with an alias. Lincoln built a whole career out of one place; the humour is in the talk, and the talk is transcribed from a village he had listened to all his life. Fifty-seven plates by Winslow Homer and Edvard Munch, among others, show boys, guides and village figures from 1841 to 1925, matching the small-town characters who fill the depot.