national brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed ashore)
fitting to the leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern
belt studded with little brass discs; and had never yet ventured into
the village. The land he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the
grounds round a landowner's house; the size of the cart-horses struck
him with astonishment; the roads resembled garden walks, and the aspect
of the people, especially on Sundays, spoke of opulence. He wondered
what made them so hardhearted and their children so bold. He got
his food at the back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his
outhouse, and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign of the
cross before he began. Beside the same pallet, kneeling in the early
darkness of the short days, he recited aloud the Lord's Prayer before he
slept. Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow with veneration from
the waist, and stand erect while the old man, with his fingers over his
upper lip, surveyed him silently. He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who
kept house frugally for her father--a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman
of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey,
steady eye. She was Church--as people said (while her father was one of
the trustees of the Baptist Chapel)--and wore a little steel cross
at her waist. She dressed severely in black, in memory of one of the
innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged
some twenty-five years ago--a young farmer who broke his neck out
hunting on the eve of the wedding day. She had the unmoved countenance
of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like her father's,
astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously ironic curl.

"These were the people to whom he owed allegiance, and an overwhelming
loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without
sunshine. 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