"These were the people to whom he owed alle-giance, and an overwhelming loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without sun-shine. All the faces were sad. He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these had been the faces of people from the other world--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 moun-tains--somewhere over the water. Was this Amer-ica, 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 differ-ent; 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 overshad-owed, oppressed, by the everyday material appear-ances, 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 mys-terious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond the compre-hension of the living. I wonder whether the mem-ory of her compassion prevented him from cutting his throat. But there! I suppose I am an old sen-timentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life which it takes all the strength of an uncommon de-spair 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 res-cued 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 Cole-brook. 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 across the grass of a terraced garden, pitched herself over a low wall head first into the horsepond in the yard below.
"Our man was out with the waggoner and the plough in the field nearest to the house, and as he was leading the team round to begin a fresh fur-row, he saw, through the gap of the gate, what for anybody else would have been a mere flutter of something white. But he had straight-glancing, quick, far-reaching eyes, that only seemed to flinch and lose their amazing power before the immensity of the sea. He was barefooted, and looking as out-landish as the heart of Swaffer could desire. Leav-ing the horses on the turn, to the inexpressible dis-ust of the waggoner he bounded off, going over the ploughed ground in long leaps, and suddenly appeared before the mother, thrust the child into her arms, and strode away.
"The pond was not very deep; but still, if he had not had such good eyes, the child would have perished--miserably suffocated in the foot or so of sticky mud at the bottom. Old Swaffer walked out slowly into the field, waited till the plough came over to his side, had a good look at him, and with-out saying a word went back to the house. But from that time they laid out his meals on the kitch-en table; and at first, Miss Swaffer, all in black and with an inscrutable face, would come and stand in the doorway of the living-room to see him make a big sign of the cross before he fell to. I believe that from that day, too, Swaffer began to pay him reg-ular wages.
"I can't follow step by step his development.
He cut his hair short, was seen in the village and along the road going to and fro to his work like any other man. Children ceased to shout after him.
