Yet older people said that Aurelius had no perception of religion, or beauty, or human suffering. Certainly he talked of these things, as I see now, with a strange and callous-seeming familiarity, as a poultry-farmer talks of chickens; but our elders did not explain it when they called it in scorn artistic. I suspect it was in scorn, though they said it was to humanise him, that they helped to get him married to a “nice sensible” girl who never came near Abercorran House. Like many other women, she had been used to petting him as if he were an animal. He responded with quaint, elaborate speeches and gestures, kneeling to speak, calling her by different invented names, but perhaps with a mock-heroic humorous gleam. He married her, and all I know is that he slipped away from the charming flat where the kindness of friends had deposited them, and never reappeared in the neighbourhood except at Abercorran House. He sent her money from time to time which he earned as trainer to a troupe of dogs in a travelling circus, as a waiter, as a commercial traveller of some sort. It was said that he had been to sea. In any case, to hear him sing “Along the plains of Mexico” was better than sailing in any ship we had ever been in or imagined. I am sure that he could not have improved his singing of “Along the Plains of Mexico” by sailing from Swansea to Ilfracombe or round Cape Horn, or by getting a heart of oak and a hand of iron. He brought nothing back with him from his travels. He had no possessions--not a book, not a watch, not an extra suit of clothes, not a lead pencil. He could live on nothing, and at times, it was said, had done so. For his hardiness was great, and habitually he ate almost nothing. Man, God, and weather could not harm him. Of course he was sometimes put upon, for he would not quarrel. For having treated him better than he appeared to have expected, some people could hardly forgive themselves until they learned to take it as creditable. One tremendous tradesman, for instance, explained his comparative civility to Aurelius on a trying occasion by blustering: “You never know where you are with these Gypsies:” he came, however, to regard himself as a benefactor. A minister of the gospel who was tricked by Aurelius’ innocence had to fall back on accusing him of concealing his age and of being a Welshman. Everyone thought him a foreigner.