the door and walked
back slowly to the kitchen. Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who
shuddered at the bare idea of being touched by that creature.

"Through this act of impulsive pity he was brought back again within
the pale of human relations with his new surroundings. He never forgot
it--never.

"That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer (Smith's nearest neighbour)
came over to give his advice, and ended by carrying him off. He stood,
unsteady on his legs, meek, and caked over in half-dried mud, while the
two men talked around him in an incomprehensible tongue. Mrs. Smith had
refused to come downstairs till the madman was off the premises; Amy
Foster, far from within the dark kitchen, watched through the open back
door; and he obeyed the signs that were made to him to the best of his
ability. But Smith was full of mistrust. 'Mind, sir! It may be all his
cunning,' he cried repeatedly in a tone of warning. When Mr. Swaffer
started the mare, the deplorable being sitting humbly by his side,
through weakness, nearly fell out over the back of the high two-wheeled
cart. Swaffer took him straight home. And it is then that I come upon
the scene.

"I was called in by the simple process of the old man beckoning to
me with his forefinger over the gate of his house as I happened to be
driving past. I got down, of course.

"'I've got something here,' he mumbled, leading the way to an outhouse
at a little distance from his other farm-buildings.

"It was there that I saw him first, in a long low room taken upon the
space of that sort of coach-house. It was bare and whitewashed, with a
small square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty pane at its further
end. He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had given him a
couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the remainder
of his strength in the exertion of cleaning himself. He was almost
speechless; his quick breathing under the blankets pulled up to his
chin, his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird
caught in a snare. While I was examining him, old Swaffer stood silently
by the door, passing the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper
lip. I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine, and
naturally made some inquiries.

"'Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns,' said the old chap in
his deliberate, unmoved manner, and as if the other had been indeed a
sort of wild animal. 'That's how I came by him. Quit