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“I could sit here,” he said, “and look at the Channel and consider the nature of this land for ever and for ever.” Now though words like this meant nothing in so early a year as the year 1888, yet I was willing to pursue them because there was, in the eyes of the little old man, a look of such wisdom, kindness, and cunning as seemed to me a marriage between those things native to the earth and those things which are divine. I mean, that he seemed to me to have all that the good animals have, which wander about in the brushwood and are happy all their lives, and also all that we have, of whom it has been well said that of every thing which runs or creeps upon earth, man is the fullest of sorrow. For this little old man seemed to have (at least such was my fantastic thought in that early year) a complete acquiescence in the soil and the air that had bred him, and yet something common to mankind and a full foreknowledge of death.

His face was of the sort which you will only see in England, being quizzical and vivacious, a little pinched together, and the hair on his head was a close mass of grey curls. His eyes were as bright as are harbour lights when they are first lit towards the closing of our winter evenings: they shone upon the daylight. His mouth was firm, but even in repose it permanently, though very slightly, smiled.