Here it was that he discovered that her wrists were bound together behind her back with a kind of plait of thongs so intricate that he was quite unable to release them. He felt his pockets for his knife, but could not find it, and then recollected suddenly that he should have a new one with him, the third prize in a whist tournament in which he had taken part that evening. He found it wrapped in paper in his overcoat pocket, with it cut the thongs and set the little creature free. She immediately responded--the first sign of animation which she had displayed--by throwing both her arms about his body and clinging to him in an ecstasy. Holding him so that, as he says, he felt the shuddering go all through her, she suddenly lowered her head and touched his wrist with her cheek. He says that instead of being cold to the touch, "like a fish," as she had seemed to be when he first took her out of the furze, she was now "as warm as a toast, like a child." So far he had put her down for "a foreigner," convenient term for defining something which you do not quite understand. She had none of his language, evidently; she was undersized, some three feet six inches by the look of her,[4] and yet perfectly proportioned. She was most curiously dressed in a frock cut to the knee, and actually in nothing else at all. It left her bare-legged and bare-armed, and was made, as he puts it himself, of stuff like cobweb: "those dusty, drooping kind which you put on your finger to stop bleeding." He could not recognise the web, but was sure that it was neither linen nor cotton. It seemed to stick to her body wherever it touched a prominent part: "you could see very well, to say nothing of feeling, that she was well made and well nourished." She ought, as he judged, to be a child of five years old, "and a feather-weight at that"; but he felt certain that she must be "much more like sixteen." It was that, I gather, which made him suspect her of being something outside experience. So far, then, it was safe to call her a foreigner: but he was not yet at the end of his discoveries. [Footnote 4: Her exact measurements are stated to have been as follows: height from crown to sole, 3 feet 5 inches. Round waist, 15 inches; round bust, 21 inches; round wrist, 3-1/2 inches; round neck, 7-1/2 inches.] Heavy footsteps, coming from the direction of Wishford, in due time proved to be those of Police Constable Gulliver, a neighbour of Beckwith's and guardian of the peace in his own village. He lifted his lantern to flash it into the traveller's eyes, and dropped it again with a pleasant "good evening." He added that it was inclined to be showery, which was more than true, as it was at the moment raining hard. With that, it seems, he would have passed on.