of
getting a glass of cider and a crust of bread in the kitchen. Moreover,
the old lady often threw him a few pennies from her window. But she was
dead now.

In the villages people gave him scarcely anything--he was too well
known. Everybody had grown tired of seeing him, day after day for forty
years, dragging his deformed and tattered person from door to door on
his wooden crutches. But he could not make up his mind to go elsewhere,
because he knew no place on earth but this particular corner of the
country, these three or four villages where he had spent the whole of
his miserable existence. He had limited his begging operations and would
not for worlds have passed his accustomed bounds.

He did not even know whether the world extended for any distance beyond
the trees which had always bounded his vision. He did not ask himself
the question. And when the peasants, tired of constantly meeting him in
their fields or along their lanes, exclaimed: "Why don't you go to other
villages instead of always limping about here?" he did not answer, but
slunk away, possessed with a vague dread of the unknown--the dread of a
poor wretch who fears confusedly a thousand things--new faces, taunts,
insults, the suspicious glances of people who do not know him and
the policemen walking in couples on the roads. These last he always
instinctively avoided, taking refuge in the bushes or behind heaps of
stones when he saw them coming.

When he perceived them in the distance, 'With uniforms gleaming in the
sun, he was suddenly possessed with unwonted agility--the agility of a
wild animal seeking its lair. He threw aside his crutches, fell to the
ground like a limp rag, made himself as small as possible and crouched
like a bare under cover, his tattered vestments blending in hue with the
earth on which he cowered.

He had never had any trouble with the police, but the instinct to avoid
them was in his blood. He seemed to have inherited it from the parents
he had never known.

He had no refuge, no roof for his head, no shelter of any kind. In
summer he slept out of doors and in winter he showed remarkable skill in
slipping unperceived into barns and stables. He always decamped before
his presence could be discovered. He knew all the holes through which
one could creep into farm buildings, and the handling of his crutches
having made his arms surprisingly muscular he often hauled himself
up through sheer strength of wrist into hay-lofts,