The Toimi died a few days ago, a month after his older brother Arne Ronka. They both lie buried in the stone-marked graveyard just behind the glacial boulders, by the sea.

I knew Arne, and I miss him. He looked to me, when he was a young man, like a hero, a kind of Norse god. When he died, he was old. At the little Lutheran church I've gone to for years to be near my Finnish friends, I used to make a point of spying out Arne and his wife Aili, and going to sit with them. Afterward at the door he always had to introduce me to the current pastor (so much a lesser man than Pastor Ronka). He would say my name, and that I was the niece of "Miss Hale, our good Angel." (My aunt, whom I used to visit 70 years ago, in this North Shore village, would be 130 years old now were she alive! Yet Arne always introduced me in the same words: he was so eager to link me to the shepherd of his father's flock.)

Heaven knows where my aunt got the funds to be the Finns' good angel. Her house and studio there were heavily mortgaged. I found her mortgage papers the other day in the studio in an old leather trunk that one of my Beecher ancestors had packed his clothes in to go to Yale. But somehow she scraped the money together, putting a Finn through college, sending another to someone with the influence to get him a good job. Summers she used to pay Arne to teach her the Finnish language, and that after she was 70. It is a notoriously difficult tongue, being, like Hungarian, pre-Indo-European. She was gifted at languages, and one of the things she did with the Finns was to start the Folly Cove French Club, to which those broadfaced blonde women