He was a shepherd, a young fellow of twenty, about five feet eight in height, but looking short on account of his extraordinary breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. His arms were like a blacksmith's, and his legs thick, and his big head was round as a Dutch cheese. He could, I imagined, have made a breach in the stone wall near which I found him with his flock, if he had lowered that hard round head and charged like a rhinoceros. His hair was light brown, and his face a uniform rosy brown--in all Hampshire no man nor woman had I seen so beautiful in colour; and his round, keen, piercing eyes were of a wonderful blue--"eyes like the sea." If this poor fellow, washed clean and clothed becomingly in white flannels, had shown himself in some great gathering at the Oval or some such place on some great day, the common people would have parted on either side to make way for him, and would have regarded him with a kind of worship--an impulse to kneel before him. There, on the downs, his appearance was almost grotesque in the dress he wore, made of some fabric intended to last for ever, but now frayed, worn to threads in places, and generally earth-coloured. A small old cap, earth-coloured too, covered a portion of his big, round head, and his ancient, lumpish, cracked and clouted boots were like the hoofs of some extinct large sort of horse which he had found fossilised among the chalk hills. He had but eleven shillings {230} a week, and could not afford to spend much on dress. How he could get enough to eat was a puzzle; he looked as if he could devour half of one of his muttons at a meal, washed down with a bucket of beer, without hurt to his digestion. In appearance he formed a startling contrast to the people around him: they were in comparison a worn-out, weary-looking race, dim-eyed, pale-faced, slow in their movements, as if they had lost all joy and interest in life. The sight of him taught me something I could not get from the books. The intensity of life in his eyes and whole expression; the rough-hewn face and rude, powerful form--rude but well balanced--the vigour in his every movement, enabled me to realise better than anything that history tells us what those men who came as strangers to these shores in the fifth century were really like, and how they could do what they did. They came, a few at a time, in open row-boats, with nothing but their rude weapons in their hands, and by pure muscular force, and because they were absolutely without fear and without compassion, and were mentally but little above a herd of buffaloes, they succeeded in conquering a great and populous country with centuries of civilisation behind it.