He had spent his last pence on potatoes and had been given the cabbage. No one would give him work on a Sunday. He had no home, no relations. Being deaf, he did not look for company. So he stood up, to get dry and to think, think, think, his hands on his hips, while he puffed at an empty pipe. During his meditation a snail had crawled half-way up his trousers, and was now all but down again. He was of middle height and build, the crookedest of men, yet upright, like a branch of oak which comes straight with all its twistings. His head was small and round, almost covered by bristly grey hair like lichen, through which peered quiet blue eyes; the face was irregular, almost shapeless, like dough being kneaded, worn by travel, passion, pain, and not a few blows; where the skin was visible at all through the hair it was like red sandstone; his teeth were white and strong and short like an old dog’s. His rough neck descended into a striped half-open shirt, to which was added a loose black waistcoat divided into thin perpendicular stripes by ribs of faded gold; his trousers, loose and patched and short, approached the colour of a hen pheasant; his bare feet were partly hidden by old black boots. His voice was hoarse and, for one of his enduring look, surprisingly small, and produced with an effort and a slight jerk of the head. He was a Sussex man, born in the year 1831, on June the twenty-first (it seemed a foppery in him to remember the day, and it was impossible to imagine with what ceremony he had remembered it year by year, during half a century or near it, on the roads of Sussex, Kent, Surrey and Hampshire). His mother was a Wild--there were several of them buried not far away under the carved double-headed tombstones by the old church with the lancet windows and the four yews. He was a labourer’s son, and he had already had a long life of hoeing and reaping and fagging when he enlisted at Chatham. He had kept his musket bright, slept hard and wet, and starved on thirteenpence a day, moving from camp to camp every two years. He had lost his youth in battle, for a bullet went through his knee; he lay four months in hospital, and they took eighteen pieces of bone out of his wound--he was still indignant because he was described as only “slightly wounded” when he was discharged after a “short service” of thirteen years. He showed his gnarled knee to explain his crookedness. Little he could tell of the battle except the sobbing of the soldier next to him--“a London chap from Haggerston way. Lord! he called for his mother and his God and me to save him, and the noise he made was worse than the firing and the groaning of the horses, and I was just thinking how I could stop his mouth for him when a bullet hits me, and down I goes like a baby.”