with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway.  They retreated, just the least bit scared by the flood of passionate speech which, turning on his pallet, he let out at them.  They admitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical—­but, in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was startling—­so excitable, so utterly unlike anything one had ever heard.  The village boys climbed up the bank to have a peep through the little square aperture.  Everybody was wondering what Mr. Swaffer would do with him.

“He simply kept him.

“Swaffer would be called eccentric were he not so much respected.  They will tell you that Mr. Swaffer sits up as late as ten o’clock at night to read books, and they will tell you also that he can write a cheque for two hundred pounds without thinking twice about it.  He himself would tell you that the Swaffers had owned land between this and Darnford for these three hundred years.  He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does not look a bit older than when I first came here.  He is a great breeder of sheep, and deals extensively in cattle.  He attends market days for miles around in every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low over the reins, his lank grey hair curling over the collar of his warm coat, and with a green plaid rug round his legs.  The calmness of advanced age gives a solemnity to his manner.  He is clean-shaved; his lips are thin and sensitive; something rigid and monarchal in the set of his features lends a certain elevation to the character of his face.  He has been known to drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody’s garden, or a monstrous cabbage grown by a cottager.  He loves to hear tell of or to be shown something that he calls ‘outlandish.’  Perhaps it was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer.  Perhaps it was only an inexplicable caprice.  All I know is that at the end of three weeks I caught sight of Smith’s lunatic digging in Swaffer’s kitchen garden.  They had found out he could use a spade.  He dug barefooted.

“His black hair flowed over his shoulders.  I suppose it was Swaffer who had given him the striped old cotton shirt; but he wore still the national brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed ashore) fitting to the leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern belt studded with little brass discs; and had never yet ventured into the village.  The land he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the grounds round a landowner’s house; the size of the cart-horses struck him with astonishment; the roads resembled garden walks, and the aspect of the people, especially on Sundays, spoke of opulence.  He wondered what made them so hardhearted and their children so bold.  He got his food at the back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse, and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign of the cross before he began.  Beside the same