A discontent, in substance very distinguished and noble, imbued his consciousness. He was still seeking solace out of life and a way that should lead to rest. But he could not find it. He was in arms on the wrong road. He missed the fundamental fact that from humanity and service arise not only the first duties of life, but also the highest rewards that life can offer. He had little desire towards his fellow-creatures. His mind appeared to magnify their deficiencies and weakness. He was ungenerous in his interpretation of motives. Mankind awoke his highest impatience. He sneered at his own shortcomings daily, and had no more mercy for the manifold disabilities of human nature in general. In the light of his religion and his learning, he conceived that man should be by many degrees a nobler and a wiser thing than he found him; and this conclusion awoke impatience and a fiery aversion. He groped therefore in a blind alley, for as yet service of man had not brought its revelation to his spirit, or opened the portals of content. He failed to perceive that the man who lives rationally for men, with all thereby involved in his duty to himself, is justifying his own existence to the limit of human capacity. Instead, he fulfilled obligations to his particular God with all his might, and supposed this rule of conduct embraced every necessity. He despised his neighbour, but he despised himself also. Thus he was logical, but such a rule of conduct left him lonely. Hence it came about that darkness clothed him like a garment, and that his kind shunned him, and cared not to consider him. He sat silent and motionless. His gift of stillness had often won some little intimate glimpse of Nature, and it did so now. A fox went by him at close quarters. It passed absorbed in its own affairs, incautious and without fear. Then suddenly it saw him, braced its muscles and slipped away like a streak of cinnamon light through the stones. It made for the dwarf oaks beneath the head of the tor, and the watcher saw its red stern rise and its white-tipped brush jerk this way and that as it leapt from boulder to boulder. A big and powerful fox--so Humphrey perceived; one that had doubtless stood before hounds in his time, and would again. Arrived at the confines of the wood, the brute hurried himself no more; but rested awhile and, with a sort of highwayman insolence, surveyed the object of alarm. Then it disappeared, and the man smiled to himself and was glad that he had seen this particular neighbour. At the poultry-house far below, moved Mrs. Hacker. Viewed from this elevation she presented nothing but a sun-bonnet and a great white square of apron. She wore black, and her bust disappeared seen thus far away, though her capacious person might be noted at a mile. Susan Hacker was florid, taciturn, and staunch to her master. If she had a hero, it was Mr. Baskerville; and if she had an antipathy, Miss Eliza Gollop stood for that repugnance.