So who are the quintessential New Englanders of our time? Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, as the living reminder of his family's legacy. Bill Russell, Carl Yastrzemski and Tom Brady, as exemplars of hope and faith on the fields and in the arenas of our dreams. John Updike, J.D. Salinger and Stephen King, symbols of the literary strain (with racy, wry and scary undertones never prominent but never quite absent either). Drew Gilpin Faust, named Harvard president and Pulitzer finalist in a remarkable two-year period.

All of them, plus one more: David Hackett Souter.

He is the New Englander whose voice you have never heard, whose face you have never seen, whose imprint you cannot escape. He may also be the last New Englander.

At a time when New England moved to McMansions and split levels with cheery paint jobs and sprawling decks, David Souter lives in a dark brown farmhouse in North Weare with a claw-foot bath tub that wasn't bought at restorationhardware.com. In an era when doing lunch became a pastime and a status statement, David Souter made do with yogurt, sometimes saving an apple for later, a guilty pleasure for the shadows of a wintry afternoon, consuming the whole thing, never throwing away the core uneaten. At a time when all of Washington went multi-media, David Souter stuck with a television that a friend from New Hampshire forced him to take (no gel, no flat screen, no digital). There is no evidence he ever watched it, or adjusted the rabbit ears.

Mr. Souter indicated last week that he soon would be departing from the Supreme Court, a departure that gives a president from another era -- perhaps, you might say, another century -- a chance to put his stamp on the highest court and shape the answers to the biggest questions of our time. This transition is almost fitting; you might be permitted to think that Mr. Souter was nominated by Lincoln, who, like the associate justice, had a taste for the mannered old ways even as he built a new world with new ways.

Mr. Souter was only the second Supreme Court justice from New Hampshire, following by 145 years the appointment of Levi Woodbury, a Jacksonian Democrat who, like David Souter, had been a member of the New Hampshire Supreme Court. Mr. Souter's life and outlook were scrutinized (and vastly misunderstood) by Washington analysts, for he was marked less by his association with President George H.W. Bush, who appointed him, and White House chief of staff (and former governor of New Hampshire) John H. Sununu, who pressed the appointment on President Bush, than he was by his membership in a remarkable troika of New Hampshire Republicans.

The other two in this Granite State trifecta were Warren B. Rudman and Thomas D. Rath. Mr. Souter served as attorney general between the two other men, one of whom became a GOP senator from New Hampshire, the other an important political adviser to five Republican presidential candidates.

Justice Souter's outlook was shaped by these men, moderate Republicans of a tradition long ago abandoned by all but Maine's two senators, and by one other, the late state Sen. Susan Neidlinger McLane, who as the daughter of a Dartmouth dean, the wife of a famous Dartmouth ski captain and the veteran of a quarter-century in the New Hampshire legislature, may have the most impeccable New England credentials of all time. You might think of her as Elsie Hillman with a New England accent.

Story never told and never refuted: The fingerprints on David Souter's landmark vote to preserve abortion rights belonged to Susan McLane. Story often told but never fully comprehended: The fingerprints on David Souter's dissent in Bush v. Gore were David Souter's alone. He was not the conservative that conservatives expected, especially after he spoke in his confirmation hearings of his adherence to "originalism." But he was never the liberal that liberals hoped for, either. He was nobody's man but his own, which confused and galled everyone.

Mr. Souter was a man of dependable habits. He wore a suit for a full week, then wore another for the next full week. Sometimes he patched those suits. He didn't have press conferences. No talking points, either. He didn't do interviews. His was not a Thornton Wilder imitation. It was the real thing.

Even so, the world tried to make David Souter fit a pattern--a Bork, or a Scalia, or an O'Connor, or even William J. Brennan Jr., the liberal whose seat he took and the man whose sickbed he visited almost every day as the grand old man of liberalism slipped away.

But these were caricatures. Many of his critics said that Justice Souter -- someone who seemed so otherworldly -- couldn't possibly know what it was like to be a woman, or a member of a minority group, or a modern citizen of a media age. Maybe they were right. But he knew one thing. He knew what it meant to be a judge.