“I like that ‘take single ticket,’” he said to himself as he sped westwards into Wales, dressed in his usual fluffy tweed suit and anarchist tie.  Upon his knees lay a brand new Hebrew grammar which he studied diligently all the way to Cardiff, and still carried in his hands when he changed into the local train that carried him laboriously into the desolation of the Pontwaun Mountains.  “It looks as though he approved of me already.  My name apparently hasn’t put him off as it does most people.  Perhaps, through it, he divines the real me!”

He smoothed down his rebellious hair as he neared the station in the dusk; but he was surprised to find only a rickety little cart drawn by a donkey sent to meet him (the house being five miles distant in the hills), and still more surprised when a huge figure of a man, hatless, dressed in knickerbockers, and with a large, floating grey beard, strode down the platform as he gave up his ticket to the station-master and announced himself as Mr. Philip Skale.  He had expected the small, foxy-faced individual of his imagination, and the shock momentarily deprived him of speech.

“Mr. Spinrobin, of course?  I am Mr. Skale—­Mr. Philip Skale.”

The voice can only be described as booming, it was so deep and vibrating; but the smile of welcome, where it escaped with difficulty from the network of beard and moustaches, was winning and almost gentle in contradistinction to the volume of that authoritative voice.  Spinrobin felt slightly bewildered—­caught up into a whirlwind that drove too many impressions through his brain for any particular one to be seized and mastered.  He found himself shaking hands—­Mr. Skale, rather, shaking his, in a capacious grasp as though it were some small indiarubber ball to be squeezed and flung away.  Mr. Skale flung it away, he felt the shock up the whole length of his arm to the shoulder.  His first impressions, he declares, he cannot remember—­they were too tumultuous—­beyond that he liked both smile and voice, the former making him feel at home, the latter filling him to the brim with a peculiar sense of well-being.  Never before had he heard his name pronounced in quite the same way; it sounded dignified, even splendid, the way Mr. Skale spoke it.  Beyond this general impression, however, he can only say that his thoughts and feelings “whirled.”  Something emanated from this giant clergyman that was somewhat enveloping and took him off his feet.  The keynote of the man had been struck at once.

“How do you do, sir?  This is the train you mentioned, I think?” Spinrobin heard his own thin voice speaking, by way, as it were, of instinctive apology that he should have put such a man to the trouble of coming to meet him.  He said “sir,” it seemed unavoidable; for there was nothing of the clergyman about him—­bishop, perhaps, or archbishop, but no suggestion of vicar or parish priest.  Somewhere, too, in his presentment he felt dimly, even at the first, there was an element of the incongruous, a meeting of things not usually found together.  The vigorous open-air life of the mountaineer spoke in the great muscular body with the broad shoulders and clean, straight limbs; but behind the brusqueness of manner lay the true gentleness of fine breeding.