pallet, kneeling in the early darkness of the short days, he recited aloud the Lord’s Prayer before he slept.  Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow with veneration from the waist, and stand erect while the old man, with his fingers over his upper lip, surveyed him silently.  He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who kept house frugally for her father—­a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey, steady eye.  She was Church—­as people said (while her father was one of the trustees of the Baptist Chapel)—­and wore a little steel cross at her waist.  She dressed severely in black, in memory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago—­a young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day.  She had the unmoved countenance of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like her father’s, astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously ironic curl.

“These were the people to whom he owed allegiance, and an overwhelming loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without sunshine.  All the faces were sad.  He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody.  It was as if these had been the faces of people from the other world—­dead people—­he used to tell me years afterwards.  Upon my word, I wonder he did not go mad.  He didn’t know where he was.  Somewhere very far from his mountains—­somewhere over the water.  Was this America, he wondered?

“If it hadn’t been for the steel cross at Miss Swaffer’s belt he would not, he confessed, have known whether he was in a Christian country at all.  He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel comforted.  There was nothing here the same as in his country!  The earth and the water were different; there were no images of the Redeemer by the roadside.  The very grass was different, and the trees.  All the trees but the three old Norway pines on the bit of lawn before Swaffer’s house, and these reminded him of his country.  He had been detected once, after dusk, with his forehead against the trunk of one of them, sobbing, and talking to himself.  They had been like brothers to him at that time, he affirmed.  Everything else was strange.  Conceive you the kind of an existence overshadowed, oppressed, by the everyday material appearances, as if by the visions of a nightmare.  At night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he had eaten in this foreign land.  She had been neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened.  Her face he remembered as the only comprehensible face amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond the comprehension of the living.  I wonder whether the memory of her compassion prevented him from cutting his throat.  But there!  I suppose I am an old sentimentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life which it takes all the strength of an uncommon despair to overcome.