r, the tool which was never
out of his fingers while the light served him. There was no more
decoration then there was comfort; except that on the smoke-stained
walls the mildew had pencilled out some strange and grotesque lines, as
if some mural painting had mouldered into ruin there. Two or three
English books alone, of the cheap continental editions, lay at one end
of a clumsy shelf; with the few cooking utensils which were absolutely
necessary, piled together on the other. There was a small stove in one
corner of the hovel, where a handful of embers could be seen at times,
like the eye of some wild creature lurking in the deep gloom.

Jean Merle, though still two or three years under fifty, was looked upon
by his neighbors as being a man of great, though unknown age. Yet,
though he stooped in the shoulders a little, and walked with his head
bent down, he was not infirm, nor had he the appearance of infirmity.
His long mountain expeditions kept his muscles in full force and
activity. But his grey face was marked with many lines, so fine as to be
seen only at close quarters; yet on the whole forming a wrinkled and
aged mask as of one far advanced in life. In addition to this
singularity of aspect there was the extraordinary seclusion and sordid
miserliness of his mode of existence, more in harmony with the
passiveness of extreme old age, than with the energy of a man still in
the prime of his days. The village mothers frightened their children
with tales about Jean Merle's gigantic strength, which made him an
object of terror to them. He sought acquaintanceship with none of his
neighbors; and they avoided him as a heretic and a stranger.

The rugged, simple, narrow life of his Swiss forefathers gathered around
him, and hedged him in. They had been peasant-farmers, with the
exception of the mountain-pastor his grandfather, and he still
well-remembered Felix Merle, after whom his boy had been called. All of
them had been men toiling with their own hands, with a never-ceasing
bodily activity, which had left them but little time or faculty for any
mental pursuit. This half of his nature fitted him well for the life
that now lay before him. As his Swiss ancestors had been for many
generations toil-worn and weather-beaten men, whose faces were sunburnt
and sun-blistered, whose backs were bent with labor, and whose weary
feet dragged heavily along the rough paths, so he became. The social
refinement of the prosperous Englis