-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.

"He did the work which was given him with an intelligence which
surprised old Swaffer. By-and-by it was discovered that he could help
at the ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks in the
cattle-yard, and was of some use with the sheep. He began to pick up
words, too, very fast; and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he
rescued from an untimely death a grand-child of old Swaffer.

"Swaffer's younger daughter is married to Willcox, a solicitor and the
Town Clerk of Colebrook. Regularly twice a year they come to stay with
the old man for a few days. Their only child, a little girl not three
years old at the time, ran out of the house alone in her little white
pinafore, and, toddling