ning reciting the Lord's Prayer,
in incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent tone, as he had heard
his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and
little, on every evening of his life. And though he wore corduroys at
work, and a slop-made pepper-and-salt suit on Sundays, strangers would
turn round to look after him on the road. His foreignness had a peculiar
and indelible stamp. At last people became used to see him. But
they never became used to him. His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy
complexion; his hat cocked on the left ear; his habit, on warm evenings,
of wearing his coat over one shoulder, like a hussar's dolman; his
manner of leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agility, but in the
ordinary course of progression--all these peculiarities were, as one
may say, so many causes of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the
village. _They_ wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat on their
backs on the grass to stare at the sky. Neither did they go about the
fields screaming dismal tunes. Many times have I heard his high-pitched
voice from behind the ridge of some sloping sheep-walk, a voice light
and soaring, like a lark's, but with a melancholy human note, over
our fields that hear only the song of birds. And I should be startled
myself. Ah! He was different: innocent of heart, and full of good will,
which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into
another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and
by an immense ignorance from his future. His quick, fervent utterance
positively shocked everybody. 'An excitable devil,' they called him.
One evening, in the tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having drunk some
whisky), he upset them all by singing a love song of his country. They
hooted him down, and he was pained; but Preble, the lame wheelwright,
and Vincent, the fat blacksmith, and the other notables too, wanted to
drink their evening beer in peace. On another occasion he tried to show
them how to dance. The dust rose in clouds from the sanded floor; he
leaped straight up amongst the deal tables, struck his heels together,
squatted on one heel in front of old Preble, shooting out the other
leg, uttered wild and exulting cries, jumped up to whirl on one foot,
snapping his fingers above his head--and a strange carter who was having
a drink in there began to swear, and cleared out with his half-pint
in his hand into the bar. But when suddenly he sprang upon