the slight air of absence in his blue eyes was not
chilling, as is that which portends a wandering of its owner on his own
business. People recognized that it meant some bee or other in that
bonnet, or elsewhere, some sound or scent or sight of life, suddenly
perceived--always of life! He had often been observed gazing with
peculiar gravity at a dead flower, bee, bird, or beetle, and, if spoken
to at such a moment, would say, "Gone!" touching a wing or petal with his
finger. To conceive of what happened after death did not apparently come
within the few large conclusions of his reflective powers. That quaint
grief of his in the presence of the death of things that were not human
had, more than anything, fostered a habit among the gentry and clergy of
the neighborhood of drawing up the mouth when they spoke of him, and
slightly raising the shoulders. For the cottagers, to be sure, his
eccentricity consisted rather in his being a 'gentleman,' yet neither
eating flesh, drinking wine, nor telling them how they ought to behave
themselves, together with the way he would sit down on anything and
listen to what they had to tell him, without giving them the impression
that he was proud of himself for doing so. In fact, it was the
extraordinary impression he made of listening and answering without
wanting anything either for himself or for them, that they could not
understand. How on earth it came about that he did not give them advice
about their politics, religion, morals, or monetary states, was to them a
never-ending mystery; and though they were too well bred to shrug their
shoulders, there did lurk in their dim minds the suspicion that 'the good
gentleman,' as they called him, was 'a tiddy-bit off.' He had, of
course, done many practical little things toward helping them and their
beasts, but always, as it seemed, by accident, so that they could never
make up their minds afterward whether he remembered having done them,
which, in fact, he probably did not; and this seemed to them perhaps the
most damning fact of all about his being--well, about his being--not
quite all there. Another worrying habit he had, too, that of apparently
not distinguishing between them and any tramps or strangers who might
happen along and come across him. This was, in their eyes, undoubtedly a
fault; for the village was, after all, their village, and he, as it were,
their property. To crown all, there was a story, full ten years old now,
w