The alternative had occurred to Gilead, but he thought it politic to remain silent. There was the sound of a bar clanking down, of a laboured sigh, and one side of the gate opened, just a jealous aperture, through which the applicant caught glimpse of a doleful yard, with a woodshed at its further end, a block or two for chopping on, as many three-legged stools, a sawyer’s trestle, and everywhere in littered confusion chips, billets and indiscriminate debris of timber. “Come in, can’t you,” said the voice, peevishly, and Gilead, slipping through, found himself face to face with Mr Winsom Wyllie. He was in an undress of grey flannel. His braces were discarded; his shirt, open and collarless, drooped in moist folds; his trousers sagged down over his boots, almost concealing them. Behind, he bore a much greater resemblance to an exhausted elephant than to any sinister figure of melodrama. Nor was his obverse prepossessing. A lugubrious, ponderous man, who took his fleshiness badly; a man who might have figured for an over-blown clown, seeing how his grizzled hair stood up from his scalp and his whiskers out from his jaws; a man with a ridiculous lachrymose mouth, a man whose voice had suety tears in it, a man who seemed to pity himself profoundly--such was the general impression conveyed to Gilead. The creature’s adiposity, he was no less convinced, was no local rising. It was a general upheaval, and nothing short of a change of constitution would suffice to reduce it. The stranger, Gilead once entered, closed the gate with a fretful slam and put up the bar. Then he turned to regard his visitor--the visitor thought morosely. “H’m!” he said at last, wearily mopping his brow. “I have committed myself, and I must go through with it, I suppose. Do you know, young man, what decided my choice of you out of--my God, I don’t dare recall the number!--myriads?” Gilead disclaimed any consciousness of exclusive merit. “It was the Montaigne,” said the stranger. “I want cheering, I want sympathy, I want self-forgetfulness; I do _not_ want irresponsible chatter. The possession, in a refined mind, of qualities suitable to my needs seemed to speak from your reply, and from your reply alone. Can you chop wood?” “I must not say I cannot,” said Gilead modestly; “because I have never tried.” “No matter,” said the stranger dispiritedly. “So long as your presence and example stimulate _me_ to exertion, my purpose is served. I will be frank with you. The weight upon my bones exactly symbolises another upon my conscience” (Gilead’s lips tightened). “The two are so associated, in fact, that, with every ounce of flesh I may lose, my conscience will be correspondingly and automatically lightened. A return to reasonable proportions would make me a happy man.”