“Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock is the first thing that came ashore from that ship.  But I have patients amongst the seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I am informed that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett, an ordinary ship’s hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks inside.  Their families ate the birds, and the hencoop was split into firewood with a hatchet.  It is possible that a man (supposing he happened to be on deck at the time of the accident) might have floated ashore on that hencoop.  He might.  I admit it is improbable, but there was the man—­and for days, nay, for weeks—­it didn’t enter our heads that we had amongst us the only living soul that had escaped from that disaster.  The man himself, even when he learned to speak intelligibly, could tell us very little.  He remembered he had felt better (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and that the darkness, the wind, and the rain took his breath away.  This looks as if he had been on deck some time during that night.  But we mustn’t forget he had been taken out of his knowledge, that he had been sea-sick and battened down below for four days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea of what was happening to him.  The rain, the wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain of his wretchedness and misery, his heartbroken astonishment that it was neither seen nor understood, his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the women fierce.  He had approached them as a beggar, it is true, he said; but in his country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars.  The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those who asked for compassion.  Smith’s strategy overcame him completely.  The wood-lodge presented the horrible aspect of a dungeon.  What would be done to him next? . . .  No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel of light.  The girl had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard.  Holding the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him half a loaf of white bread—­’such bread as the rich eat in my country,’ he used to say.

“At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts of rubbish, stiff, hungry, trembling, miserable, and doubtful.  ‘Can you eat this?’ she asked in her soft and timid voice.  He must have taken her for a ‘gracious lady.’  He devoured ferociously, and tears were falling on the crust.  Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and imprinted a kiss on her hand.  She was not frightened.  Through his forlorn condition she had observed that he was good-looking.  She shut the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen.  Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who shuddered at the bare idea of being touched by that creature.