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 regular 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. He became aware of
social differences, but remained for a long time surprised at the bare
poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn't understand
either why they were kept shut up on week days. There was nothing to
steal in them. Was it to keep people from praying too often? The rectory
took much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies
attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion. They could not,
however, break him of his habit of crossing himself, but he went so far
as to take off the string with a couple of brass medals the size of a
sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of scapulary which he
wore round his neck. He hung them on the wall by the side of his bed,
and he was still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord's Prayer,
in incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent tone, as he had heard
his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and
little, on every evening of his life. And though he wore corduroys at
work, and a slop-made pepper-and-salt suit on Sundays, strangers would
turn round to look after him on the road. His foreignness had a peculiar
and indelible stamp. At last people became used to see him. But
they never became used to him. His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy
complexion; his hat cocked on the left ear; his habit, on warm evenings,
of wearing his coat over one shoulder, like a hussar's dolman; his
manner of leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agility, but in the
ordinary course of progression--all these peculiarities were, as one