greatest enterprises in the conquest of the earth had for their
beginning just such a bargaining away of the paternal cow for the mirage
or true gold far away! I have been telling you more or less in my own
words what I learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years,
during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him.
He told me this story of his adventure with many flashes of white
teeth and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anxious
baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language, with great fluency,
but always with that singing, soft, and at the same time vibrating
intonation that instilled a strangely penetrating power into the sound
of the most familiar English words, as if they had been the words of
an unearthly language. And he always would come to an end, with many
emphatic shakes of his head, upon that awful sensation of his heart
melting within him directly he set foot on board that ship. Afterwards
there seemed to come for him a period of blank ignorance, at any rate as
to facts. No doubt he must have been abominably sea-sick and abominably
unhappy--this soft and passionate adventurer, taken thus out of his
knowledge, and feeling bitterly as he lay in his emigrant bunk his utter
loneliness; for his was a highly sensitive nature. The next thing
we know of him for certain is that he had been hiding in Hammond's
pig-pound by the side of the road to Norton six miles, as the crow
flies, from the sea. Of these experiences he was unwilling to speak:
they seemed to have seared into his soul a sombre sort of wonder and
indignation. Through the rumours of the country-side, which lasted for
a good many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen of West
Colebrook had been disturbed and startled by heavy knocks against the
walls of weatherboard cottages, and by a voice crying piercingly strange
words in the night. Several of them turned out even, but, no doubt, he
had fled in sudden alarm at their rough angry tones hailing each other
in the darkness. A sort of frenzy must have helped him up the steep