neral appearance, to what one might call the
upper labouring class. He wore a decent square felt hat, a shabby
respectable overcoat, a workman's knitted waistcoat, and workman's
corduroys, and he carried an umbrella. His upper part might have
belonged to a small well-to-do tradesman, while his lower bore marks of
recent bricklaying. Without its being remarkable, he had what one calls
a good face, somewhat aquiline in character, with a refined forehead
and nose.

His cheeks were shaved, and his whitening beard and moustache were worn
somewhat after the fashion of Charles Dickens. This gave a slight
touch of severity to a face that was full of quiet strength.

Passing the time of day to each other, we were soon in conversation, I
asking him this and that question about the neighbouring country-side,
of which I gathered he was an old inhabitant.

"Yes," he said presently, "I was the first to put stick or stone on
Whortleberry Common yonder. Fifteen years ago I built my own wood
cottage there, and now I'm rebuilding it of good Surrey stone."

"Do you mean that you are building it yourself, with your own hands, no
one to help you?" I asked.

"Not so much as to carry a pail of water," he replied. "I'm my own
contractor, my own carpenter, and my own bricklayer, and I shall be
sixty-seven come Michaelmas," he added, by no means irrelevantly.

There was pride in his voice,--pardonable pride, I thought, for who of
us would not be proud to be able to build his own house from floor to
chimney?

"Sixty-seven,--a man can see and do a good deal in that time," I said,
not flattering myself on the originality of the remark, but desiring to
set him talking. In the country, as elsewhere, we must forego
profundity if we wish to be understood.

"Yes, sir," he said, "I have been about a good deal in my time. I have
seen pretty well all of the world there is to see, and sailed as far as
ship could take me."

"Indeed, you have been a sailor too?"

"Twenty-two thousand miles of sea," he continued, without directly
answering my remark. "Yes, Vancouver's about as far as any vessel need
want to go; and then I have caught seals off the coast of Labrador, and
walked my way through the raspberry plains at the back of the White
Mountains."

"Vancouver," "Labrador," "The White Mountains," the very names, thus
casually mentioned on a Surrey heath, seemed full of the sounding sea.
Like talismans they whisked one away to strange lands