are uncommon, such animals as are rare; and Society had no use for one
like Tod, so uncut to its pattern as to be practically unconscious of
its existence. Not that he had deliberately turned his back on anything;
he had merely begun as a very young man to keep bees. The better to do
that he had gone on to the cultivation of flowers and fruit, together
with just enough farming as kept his household in vegetables, milk,
butter, and eggs. Living thus amongst insects, birds, cows, and the
peace of trees, he had become queer. His was not a very reflective mind,
it distilled but slowly certain large conclusions, and followed intently
the minute happenings of his little world. To him a bee, a bird, a
flower, a tree was well-nigh as interesting as a man; yet men, women,
and especially children took to him, as one takes to a Newfoundland dog,
because, though capable of anger, he seemed incapable of contempt, and
to be endowed with a sort of permanent wonder at things. Then, too, he
was good to look at, which counts for more than a little in the scales
of our affections; indeed, the slight air of absence in his blue eyes
was not chilling, as is that which portends a wandering of its owner on
his own business. People recognized that it meant some bee or other
in that bonnet, or elsewhere, some sound or scent or sight of life,
suddenly perceived--always of life! He had often been observed gazing
with peculiar gravity at a dead flower, bee, bird, or beetle, and, if
spoken to at such a moment, would say, "Gone!" touching a wing or
petal with his finger. To conceive of what happened after death did
not apparently come within the few large conclusions of his reflective
powers. That quaint grief of his in the presence of the death of things
that were not human had, more than anything, fostered a habit among the
gentry and clergy of the neighborhood of drawing up the mouth when they
spoke of him, and slightly raising the shoulders. For the cottagers, to
be sure, his eccentricity consisted rather in his being a 'gentleman,'
yet neither eating flesh, drinking wine, nor telling them how they