Rarely, indeed, he was seen. Sunday lovers, strolling hand in hand up the valley, came to a point where they went tiptoe and peered about for him. He might be described motionless, folded in his white robe, midway between ridge and hollow; or a gleam of him flashed between the trees of the brake would perhaps be all that they would get for an hour of watching. The hill brows would, on such days, be lined with patient onlookers; all eyes would be up the narrow valley to its head under Hirlebury, where, below the little wood, his grey hut could be seen, deep-eaved, mysterious, blankly holding its secrets behind empty windows. None ever ventured to explore at close quarters; and if the tenant had appeared, a thousand to one they would all have looked the other way. The Wiltshire peasant is a gentleman from the heart outwards. So, too, carters, ploughmen, reapers in the vales would sometimes see his gaunt figure monstrous on the sky-line, cowled and with uplifted arms, adoring (it was supposed) the sun, or leaning on his staff, motionless and rapt, meditating death and mutability. He lost nothing by such change apparitions; on the contrary, he gained the name of a wise man who had powers of divination and healing. In the cottage whither he went once a week for bread, a child had been sick of a burning fever. His hands, averred the mother, had cured it. Groping and making passes over its stomach, rubbing in oils, relief had come, then quiet sleep and a cool forehead. After this an old man, crippled with rheumatics, had hobbled up to the very edge of his dominion, and had waited shaking there upon his staff until he could get speech with the white stranger. He, too, had had the reward of his relief. If he was not made sound again, he was relieved and heartened. He had said that, if he was spared, he was hopeful to stretch to his height again, which had been six feet all but an inch. The stranger, said he, had put him in the way of new life, and whatever he might mean--whether that he were a Salvationist or a quack doctor--he would say no more. After that, a young woman went to him to get him to name the father of her child, and returned, and was modest for a month, and a good mother when the time came. And true it was that her chap came forward and saw the vicar about it, and that they were asked in church. Out of such things as these his fame grew.