No one, as I said, unless it were his old friend the Vicar, knew whence or why the old Scholar had come to take up his abode among us. We thought he must have had some great sorrow in his life which was still a burden to him: but if it was the old old story, he never told his love. Yet the burden he carried, if there were one, did not make him a less cheerful neighbour to the folk around him. He knew all the old people in the village, if not all the young ones: he would sit chatting in their cottages on a wet day, and on a fine one he would stroll around with some old fellow past his work, and glean old words and sayings, and pick up odds and ends of treasure for the history of the parish which he was going to write some day. “I am like Dr. and Mrs. Jackson,” he would say: “I poke and pry into all the corners of the old place, and when I find anything that catches my eye I carry it home and hide it away. And really I don’t know that my treasures will ever come to light, any more than the Doctor’s up there in the tower.” Those who were ever admitted to his study, as I sometimes was in my college vacations, knew that there was great store of hidden treasure there; and now and again he would talk to me of the church and its monuments, of the manor and its copyholds, of furlongs and virgates and courts leet and courts baron, and many other things for which I cared little, though I listened to please him, and left him well pleased myself. But at other times, and chiefly on those dim still days of autumn when a mist is apt to hang over men’s hearts as over field and woodland, he would walk up and down his garden path ‘talking to hisself in furrin tongues’ as our old sexton expressed it, who heard him as he dug a grave in the adjoining churchyard. Once or twice I heard him myself, when I happened to be within range of his gentle voice. Sometimes it was Greek, and then I could not easily follow it. Once I heard “Sed neque Medorum silvæ,” and could just catch sight of him pausing to look round at the grey fields as he slowly added line to line of that immortal song. And there were single lines which he would repeat again and again, cherishing them with tenderness like old jewels, and doubtless seeing many a sparkle in them that I could not, as he turned them over and over. And there were bits of Latin from some author unknown to me then, known to me later as the unknown author of the “De Imitatione”: “Unde coronabitur patientia tua, si nihil adversi occurrerit;” or, “Nimis avide consolationem quæris.”