the one talent. Yet another view explained the entire matter by
regarding the stranger as a harmless lunatic. That had the
advantage of accounting for everything straight away.

Between these main groups there were waverers and compromisers.
Sussex folk have few superstitions, and it was only after the
events of early April that the thought of the supernatural was
first whispered in the village. Even then it was only credited
among the women folk.

But whatever they thought of him, people in Iping, on the whole,
agreed in disliking him. His irritability, though it might have
been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing
to these quiet Sussex villagers. The frantic gesticulations they
surprised now and then, the headlong pace after nightfall that
swept him upon them round quiet corners, the inhuman bludgeoning
of all tentative advances of curiosity, the taste for twilight
that led to the closing of doors, the pulling down of blinds,
the extinction of candles and lamps--who could agree with such
goings on? They drew aside as he passed down the village, and when
he had gone by, young humourists would up with coat-collars and
down with hat-brims, and go pacing nervously after him in imitation
of his occult bearing. There was a song popular at that time called
"The Bogey Man". Miss Statchell sang it at the schoolroom concert
(in aid of the church lamps), and thereafter whenever one or two of
the villagers were gathered together and the stranger appeared, a
bar or so of this tune, more or less sharp or flat, was whistled in
the midst of them. Also belated little children would call "Bogey
Man!" after him, and make off tremulously elated.