"As the creature approached him, jabbering in a most discomposing
manner, Smith (unaware that he was being addressed as 'gracious lord,'
and adjured in God's name to afford food and shelter) kept on speaking
firmly but gently to it, and retreating all the time into the other
yard. At last, watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bundled him
headlong into the wood-lodge, and instantly shot the bolt. Thereupon
he wiped his brow, though the day was cold. He had done his duty to
the community by shutting up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac.
Smith isn't a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for
that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself
whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime,
at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith
was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but
Amy Foster sobbed piteously at the kitchen door, wringing her hands and
muttering, 'Don't! don't!' I daresay Smith had a rough time of it that
evening with one noise and another, and this insane, disturbing voice
crying obstinately through the door only added to his irritation. He
couldn't possibly have connected this troublesome lunatic with the
sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which there had been a rumour in the
Darnford marketplace. And I daresay the man inside had been very near
to insanity on that night. Before his excitement collapsed and he became
unconscious he was throwing himself violently about in the dark, rolling
on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with rage, cold, hunger,
amazement, and despair.

"He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians, and the
vessel sunk the night before in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship
_Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea_, of appalling memory.