a table and
continued to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered. He didn't
want any 'acrobat tricks in the taproom.' They laid their hands on him.
Having had a glass or two, Mr. Swaffer's foreigner tried to expostulate:
was ejected forcibly: got a black eye.

"I believe he felt the hostility of his human surroundings. But he was
tough--tough in spirit, too, as well as in body. Only the memory of the
sea frightened him, with that vague terror that is left by a bad dream.
His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to America. I had
often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold
can be found lying ready and to be got for the trouble of the picking
up. How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when
there had been sold a cow, two ponies, and a bit of land to pay for
his going? His eyes would fill with tears, and, averting them from the
immense shimmer of the sea, he would throw himself face down on the
grass. But sometimes, cocking his hat with a little conquering air, he
would defy my wisdom. He had found his bit of true gold. That was Amy
Foster's heart; which was 'a golden heart, and soft to people's misery,'
he would say in the accents of overwhelming conviction.

"He was called Yanko. He had explained that this meant little John; but
as he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer (some word
sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall) he got it for his
surname. And this is the only trace of him that the succeeding ages
may find in the marriage register of the parish. There it stands--Yanko
Goorall--in the rector's handwriting. The crooked cross made by the
castaway, a cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the most solemn
part of the whole ceremony, is all that remains now to perpetuate the
memory of his name.

"His courtship had lasted some time--ever since he got his precarious
footing in the community. It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green
satin ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his country. You
bought a ribbon at a Jew's stall on a fair-day. I don't suppose the
girl knew what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honourable
intentions could not be mistaken.

"It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I
fully understood how, for a hundred futile and inappreciable reasons,
how--shall I say odious?--he was to all the countryside. Every old woman
in the village was up in arms. Sm