In body he was tall and muscular, as you have seen. In face he was dark and sunburned, having something of a foreign mien. Black hair covered his head; his eyes, grey and far-seeing, looked straight upon the world unflinching. Clear eyes they were, having the look of seeing more than was physically apparent. They would gaze at you very frankly after the manner of a man who has nothing to hide, and yet you found yourself no nearer knowledge of the mind of the gazer in meeting them. No doubt this last lent a hand in giving colour to the rumour of mystery, though truly that he was seldom seen beyond the forest was mystery enough for peasant folk. Your coarser man dwells willingly in herds, save when he is injured. Then it is his instinct to creep away from sight after the manner of some wounded beast. Oswald was his name: and Oswald the Recluse men called him. He was seldom seen, as I have told you. Now and again men had glimpses of him, this at dawn or sunset, walking some distant hillside. Boys penetrating the depths of the forest in search of birds’ nests brought back word of him sitting by his cabin door, very still and silent. Yet none ventured within distance of discovery by him; or fancied they did not. Had they guessed at the alert mind within the still body, they had known their presence less hidden than they fondly imagined. It disturbed him no more than the scampering of a squirrel up a tree, or the rustle of a dormouse among dried leaves. These brown-faced youngsters, peering shyly curious from among bush and bracken, were to him but part and parcel of the great stream of Nature’s life around him. They were young enough to have no conscious separation from it. They took hunger and sleepiness in the natural course of things, neither denying the one nor combating the other. He saw in them merely young animals, unselfconscious though shy of the unknown: in this case of himself. It was with your grown man that, for the most part, he knew himself in lack of sympathy; those who neither consciously nor unconsciously accept Nature as their mistress, nor see their own lordship of her: those who grumble and carp at her decrees, master neither of her nor of themselves. In this mastery alone he saw full freedom of spirit. I have told you that he worshipped Nature; that she was his mistress. This is true. But it was the worship a man gives to the woman who is his mate as well as his goddess; who knows himself her lord even while he does her willing homage. * * * * *