rowed with
equal abruptness, and I nearly knocked him off the gate on which he
was leaning. I pulled up to apologize, and since he seemed ready for
society, and even pathetically pleased with it, I tossed the Daily
Wire over a hedge and fell into speech with him. He wore a wreck of
respectable clothes, and his face had that plebeian refinement which one
sees in small tailors and watchmakers, in poor men of sedentary trades.
Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt and
tattered as himself, but I do not think that the tragedy that he
symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood. There was a fixed
look in his face which told that he was one of those who in keeping body
and soul together have difficulties not only with the body, but also
with the soul.

He was a Cockney by birth, and retained the touching accent of those
streets from which I am an exile; but he had lived nearly all his life
in this countryside; and he began to tell me the affairs of it in that
formless, tail-foremost way in which the poor gossip about their great
neighbours. Names kept coming and going in the narrative like charms or
spells, unaccompanied by any biographical explanation. In particular
the name of somebody called Sir Joseph multiplied itself with the
omnipresence of a deity. I took Sir Joseph to be the principal landowner
of the district; and as the confused picture unfolded itself, I began to
form a definite and by no means pleasing picture of Sir Joseph. He was
spoken of in a strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a child might
speak of a stepmother or an unavoidable nurse; something intimate, but
by no means tender; something that was waiting for you by your own bed
and board; that told you to do this and forbade you to do that, with a
caprice that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not appear that
Sir Joseph was popular, but he was "a household word." He was not
so much a public man as a sort of private god or omnipotence. The
particular man to whom I spoke said he had "been in trouble," and that
Sir Joseph had been "pretty hard on him."

And under that grey and silver cloudland, with a background of those
frost-bitten and wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me a tale
which, true or false, was as heartrending as Romeo and Juliet.

He had slowly built up in the village a small business as a
photographer, and he was engaged to a girl at one of the lodges, whom he
loved with passion. "I'm the