ought to behave themselves, together with the way he would sit down on
anything and listen to what they had to tell him, without giving them
the impression that he was proud of himself for doing so. In fact, it
was the extraordinary impression he made of listening and answering
without wanting anything either for himself or for them, that they could
not understand. How on earth it came about that he did not give them
advice about their politics, religion, morals, or monetary states, was
to them a never-ending mystery; and though they were too well bred to
shrug their shoulders, there did lurk in their dim minds the suspicion
that 'the good gentleman,' as they called him, was 'a tiddy-bit off.'
He had, of course, done many practical little things toward helping them
and their beasts, but always, as it seemed, by accident, so that they
could never make up their minds afterward whether he remembered having
done them, which, in fact, he probably did not; and this seemed to them
perhaps the most damning fact of all about his being--well, about his
being--not quite all there. Another worrying habit he had, too, that of
apparently not distinguishing between them and any tramps or strangers
who might happen along and come across him. This was, in their eyes,
undoubtedly a fault; for the village was, after all, their village, and
he, as it were, their property. To crown all, there was a story,
full ten years old now, which had lost nothing in the telling, of his
treatment of a cattle-drover. To the village it had an eerie look, that
windmill-like rage let loose upon a man who, after all, had only been
twisting a bullock's tail and running a spiked stick into its softer
parts, as any drover might. People said--the postman and a wagoner had
seen the business, raconteurs born, so that the tale had perhaps lost
nothing--that he had positively roared as he came leaping down into the
lane upon the man, a stout and thick-set fellow, taken him up like a
baby, popped him into a furzebush, and held him there. People said that
his own bare arms had been pricked to the very shoulder from pressing