a very cruel man whom he did not like telling about. They asked him if he was ever confirmed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they tried, but I could not confirm.’ He would do anything for his master, rise at any hour of the night though he loved his bed, and go anywhere. Summer or Winter, he would not sleep in a house, but in a barn. Except his master’s in the last illness, he would not enter any house. He was fond of beer in large quantities, but if he got drunk with it he was ashamed of himself, and might go off and not return for months: then one day he would emerge from the barn, shaking himself and smiling an awkward twisted smile and as bashful as a baby. What a place this modern world is for a man like that, now. I do not like to think he is still alive in it. All the people who could understand him are in the workhouse or the churchyard. The churchyard is the only place where he would be likely to stay long. No prison, asylum, or workhouse, could have kept him alive for many days. “The church was like a barn except that it was nearly always empty, and only mice ever played in it. Though I went to it every Sunday I never really got over my dislike of the parson, which began in terror. He was the only man in the country who invariably wore black from top to toe. One hot, shining day I was playing in a barn, and the doors were open, so that I saw a field of poppies making the earth look as if it had caught fire in the sun; the swallows were coming in and out, and I was alone, when suddenly a black man stood in the sunny doorway. The swallows dashed and screamed at him angrily, and I thought that they would destroy themselves, for they returned again and again to within an inch of him. I could not move. He stood still, then with a smile and a cough he went away without having said a word. The next time I saw him was in the churchyard, when I was about five, and had not yet begun to attend the Church; in fact I had never entered it to my knowledge. The nurse-girl wheeled me up to the churchyard wall and stopped at the moment when the black man appeared out of the church. Behind him several men were carrying a long box between them on their shoulders, and they also were in complete black, and after them walked men, women, and children, in black; one of the older women was clinging convulsively to a stiff young man. When they had all stopped, the parson coughed and muttered something, which was followed by a rustling and a silence; the woman clinging to the young man sobbed aloud, and her hair fell all over her cheeks like rain. The nurse-girl had been chatting with a few passers-by who were watching outside the wall, but as I saw the woman’s hair fall I began to cry and I was hurried away. Through the lych-gate I saw a hole in the ground and everyone looking down into it as if they had lost something. At this I stopped crying and asked the girl what they were looking for; but she only boxed my ears and I cried again.