initial commit of ebook 495HEADmain

12 files changed, 6420 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/495-0.txt b/495-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..499815b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/495-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1497 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Amy Foster
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: April 1996 [EBook #495]
+Last Updated: September 9, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMY FOSTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+AMY FOSTER
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+Kennedy is a country doctor, and lives in Colebrook, on the shores of
+Eastbay. The high ground rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the
+little town crowds the quaint High Street against the wall which defends
+it from the sea. Beyond the sea-wall there curves for miles in a vast
+and regular sweep the barren beach of shingle, with the village of
+Brenzett standing out darkly across the water, a spire in a clump of
+trees; and still further out the perpendicular column of a lighthouse,
+looking in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the
+vanishing-point of the land. The country at the back of Brenzett is
+low and flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and
+occasionally a big ship, windbound or through stress of weather, makes
+use of the anchoring ground a mile and a half due north from you as
+you stand at the back door of the “Ship Inn” in Brenzett. A dilapidated
+windmill near by lifting its shattered arms from a mound no loftier than
+a rubbish heap, and a Martello tower squatting at the water’s edge half
+a mile to the south of the Coastguard cottages, are familiar to the
+skippers of small craft. These are the official seamarks for the
+patch of trustworthy bottom represented on the Admiralty charts by an
+irregular oval of dots enclosing several figures six, with a tiny anchor
+engraved among them, and the legend “mud and shells” over all.
+
+The brow of the upland overtops the square tower of the Colebrook
+Church. The slope is green and looped by a white road. Ascending along
+this road, you open a valley broad and shallow, a wide green trough
+of pastures and hedges merging inland into a vista of purple tints and
+flowing lines closing the view.
+
+In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook and up to Darnford, the
+market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy.
+He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards had been the
+companion of a famous traveller, in the days when there were continents
+with unexplored interiors. His papers on the fauna and flora made him
+known to scientific societies. And now he had come to a country
+practice--from choice. The penetrating power of his mind, acting like
+a corrosive fluid, had destroyed his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence
+is of a scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of that
+unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a particle of a
+general truth in every mystery.
+
+A good many years ago now, on my return from abroad, he invited me to
+stay with him. I came readily enough, and as he could not neglect his
+patients to keep me company, he took me on his rounds--thirty miles or
+so of an afternoon, sometimes. I waited for him on the roads; the horse
+reached after the leafy twigs, and, sitting in the dogcart, I could hear
+Kennedy’s laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage. He
+had a big, hearty laugh that would have fitted a man twice his size, a
+brisk manner, a bronzed face, and a pair of grey, profoundly attentive
+eyes. He had the talent of making people talk to him freely, and an
+inexhaustible patience in listening to their tales.
+
+One day, as we trotted out of a large village into a shady bit of road,
+I saw on our left hand a low, black cottage, with diamond panes in the
+windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some roses
+climbing on the rickety trellis-work of the tiny porch. Kennedy pulled
+up to a walk. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket
+over a line stretched between two old apple-trees. And as the bobtailed,
+long-necked chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand,
+covered by a thick dog-skin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the
+hedge: “How’s your child, Amy?”
+
+I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but
+as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the
+squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight knot at
+the back of the head. She looked quite young. With a distinct catch in
+her breath, her voice sounded low and timid.
+
+“He’s well, thank you.”
+
+We trotted again. “A young patient of yours,” I said; and the doctor,
+flicking the chestnut absently, muttered, “Her husband used to be.”
+
+“She seems a dull creature,” I remarked listlessly.
+
+“Precisely,” said Kennedy. “She is very passive. It’s enough to look
+at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow,
+prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind--an inertness
+that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises
+of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate, such as you
+see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She’s the daughter
+of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd;
+the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with
+the cook of his widowed father--a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who
+passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter
+threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to
+serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of
+their characters. There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a
+subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that
+fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads--over all our
+heads....”
+
+The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim of the sun, all red
+in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed
+rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant
+horizon of the sea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed
+with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in
+minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen. From the edge
+of a copse a waggon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge.
+Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed up against the red
+sun, triumphantly big, enormous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two
+slow-stepping steeds of legendary proportions. And the clumsy figure of
+the man plodding at the head of the leading horse projected itself on
+the background of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness. The end of his
+carter’s whip quivered high up in the blue. Kennedy discoursed.
+
+“She’s the eldest of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put
+her out to service at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, the
+tenant’s wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith,
+a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every
+afternoon. I don’t know what induced me to notice her at all. There
+are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness
+in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at
+a vague shape which, after all, may be nothing more curious or strange
+than a signpost. The only peculiarity I perceived in her was a slight
+hesitation in her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer which passes
+away with the first word. When sharply spoken to, she was apt to lose
+her head at once; but her heart was of the kindest. She had never been
+heard to express a dislike for a single human being, and she was tender
+to every living creature. She was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith,
+to their dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs. Smith’s grey parrot, its
+peculiarities exercised upon her a positive fascination. Nevertheless,
+when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in
+human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did
+not prevent the crime. For Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her
+stupidity; on the other hand, her want of charm, in view of Smith’s
+well-known frivolousness, was a great recommendation. Her short-sighted
+eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been
+seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping a toad in
+difficulties. If it’s true, as some German fellow has said, that without
+phosphorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there is no
+kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had some.
+She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be
+moved by pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room
+for doubt in the matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of
+beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar
+shape.
+
+“How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable
+mystery. She was born in the village, and had never been further away
+from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived for four years
+with the Smiths. New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from
+the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields,
+hollows, rises; at the trees and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four
+men about the farm, always the same--day after day, month after month,
+year after year. She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it
+seemed to me, she did not know how to smile. Sometimes of a fine Sunday
+afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a
+large grey hat trimmed with a black feather (I’ve seen her in that
+finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb over two stiles, tramp
+over three fields and along two hundred yards of road--never further.
+There stood Foster’s cottage. She would help her mother to give their
+tea to the younger children, wash up the crockery, kiss the little ones,
+and go back to the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the change, all
+the relaxation. She never seemed to wish for anything more. And then
+she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately--perhaps
+helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful
+spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and
+fateful impulse--a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and
+possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a
+pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky--and to be awakened at last
+from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment,
+from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a
+brute....”
+
+With the sun hanging low on its western limit, the expanse of the
+grass-lands framed in the counter-scarps of the rising ground took on
+a gorgeous and sombre aspect. A sense of penetrating sadness, like that
+inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the silence
+of the fields. The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with downcast
+eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-burdened earth had weighted their
+feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances.
+
+“Yes,” said the doctor to my remark, “one would think the earth is under
+a curse, since of all her children these that cling to her the closest
+are uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their very hearts were
+loaded with chains. But here on this same road you might have seen
+amongst these heavy men a being lithe, supple, and long-limbed, straight
+like a pine with something striving upwards in his appearance as though
+the heart within him had been buoyant. Perhaps it was only the force of
+the contrast, but when he was passing one of these villagers here, the
+soles of his feet did not seem to me to touch the dust of the road. He
+vaulted over the stiles, paced these slopes with a long elastic stride
+that made him noticeable at a great distance, and had lustrous black
+eyes. He was so different from the mankind around that, with his freedom
+of movement, his soft--a little startled, glance, his olive complexion
+and graceful bearing, his humanity suggested to me the nature of a
+woodland creature. He came from there.”
+
+The doctor pointed with his whip, and from the summit of the descent
+seen over the rolling tops of the trees in a park by the side of the
+road, appeared the level sea far below us, like the floor of an immense
+edifice inlaid with bands of dark ripple, with still trails of glitter,
+ending in a belt of glassy water at the foot of the sky. The light blur
+of smoke, from an invisible steamer, faded on the great clearness of the
+horizon like the mist of a breath on a mirror; and, inshore, the white
+sails of a coaster, with the appearance of disentangling themselves
+slowly from under the branches, floated clear of the foliage of the
+trees.
+
+“Shipwrecked in the bay?” I said.
+
+“Yes; he was a castaway. A poor emigrant from Central Europe bound to
+America and washed ashore here in a storm. And for him, who knew nothing
+of the earth, England was an undiscovered country. It was some time
+before he learned its name; and for all I know he might have expected to
+find wild beasts or wild men here, when, crawling in the dark over
+the sea-wall, he rolled down the other side into a dyke, where it was
+another miracle he didn’t get drowned. But he struggled instinctively
+like an animal under a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into
+a field. He must have been, indeed, of a tougher fibre than he looked
+to withstand without expiring such buffetings, the violence of his
+exertions, and so much fear. Later on, in his broken English that
+resembled curiously the speech of a young child, he told me himself that
+he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer in this world. And
+truly--he would add--how was he to know? He fought his way against the
+rain and the gale on all fours, and crawled at last among some sheep
+huddled close under the lee of a hedge. They ran off in all directions,
+bleating in the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar sound he
+heard on these shores. It must have been two in the morning then. And
+this is all we know of the manner of his landing, though he did not
+arrive unattended by any means. Only his grisly company did not begin to
+come ashore till much later in the day....”
+
+The doctor gathered the reins, clicked his tongue; we trotted down
+the hill. Then turning, almost directly, a sharp corner into the High
+Street, we rattled over the stones and were home.
+
+Late in the evening Kennedy, breaking a spell of moodiness that had come
+over him, returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he paced the long
+room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the
+papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after
+the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying
+motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir
+of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth
+below--never a sign of life but the scent of climbing jasmine; and
+Kennedy’s voice, speaking behind me, passed through the wide casement,
+to vanish outside in a chill and sumptuous stillness.
+
+“... The relations of shipwrecks in the olden time tell us of much
+suffering. Often the castaways were only saved from drowning to die
+miserably from starvation on a barren coast; others suffered violent
+death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence
+with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion,
+dislike or fear. We read about these things, and they are very pitiful.
+It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless,
+incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of
+the earth. Yet amongst all the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild
+parts of the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to
+suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am speaking of, the most
+innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay,
+almost within sight from this very window.
+
+“He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed, in the course of time we
+discovered he did not even know that ships had names--‘like Christian
+people’; and when, one day, from the top of the Talfourd Hill, he beheld
+the sea lying open to his view, his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air
+of wild surprise, as though he had never seen such a sight before. And
+probably he had not. As far as I could make out, he had been hustled
+together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth
+of the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his surroundings, too weary
+to see anything, too anxious to care. They were driven below into the
+‘tweendeck and battened down from the very start. It was a low timber
+dwelling--he would say--with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in
+his country, but you went into it down a ladder. It was very large, very
+cold, damp and sombre, with places in the manner of wooden boxes where
+people had to sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all ways
+at once all the time. He crept into one of these boxes and laid down
+there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before,
+keeping his bundle and his stick by his side. People groaned, children
+cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place
+creaked, and everything was being shaken so that in one’s little box one
+dared not lift one’s head. He had lost touch with his only companion (a
+young man from the same valley, he said), and all the time a great
+noise of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell--boom! boom! An awful
+sickness overcame him, even to the point of making him neglect his
+prayers. Besides, one could not tell whether it was morning or evening.
+It seemed always to be night in that place.
+
+“Before that he had been travelling a long, long time on the iron track.
+He looked out of the window, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it,
+and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly
+round and round about him till his head swam. He gave me to understand
+that he had on his passage beheld uncounted multitudes of people--whole
+nations--all dressed in such clothes as the rich wear. Once he was made
+to get out of the carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in a
+house of bricks with his bundle under his head; and once for many hours
+he had to sit on a floor of flat stones dozing, with his knees up and
+with his bundle between his feet. There was a roof over him, which
+seemed made of glass, and was so high that the tallest mountain-pine
+he had ever seen would have had room to grow under it. Steam-machines
+rolled in at one end and out at the other. People swarmed more than you
+can see on a feast-day round the miraculous Holy Image in the yard of
+the Carmelite Convent down in the plains where, before he left his home,
+he drove his mother in a wooden cart--a pious old woman who wanted to
+offer prayers and make a vow for his safety. He could not give me an
+idea of how large and lofty and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and
+clang of iron, the place was, but some one had told him it was called
+Berlin. Then they rang a bell, and another steam-machine came in, and
+again he was taken on and on through a land that wearied his eyes by its
+flatness without a single bit of a hill to be seen anywhere. One more
+night he spent shut up in a building like a good stable with a litter
+of straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a lot of men, of whom
+not one could understand a single word he said. In the morning they
+were all led down to the stony shores of an extremely broad muddy river,
+flowing not between hills but between houses that seemed immense. There
+was a steam-machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it
+packed tight, only now there were with them many women and children who
+made much noise. A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face; he was
+wet through, and his teeth chattered. He and the young man from the same
+valley took each other by the hand.
+
+“They thought they were being taken to America straight away, but
+suddenly the steam-machine bumped against the side of a thing like a
+house on the water. The walls were smooth and black, and there uprose,
+growing from the roof as it were, bare trees in the shape of crosses,
+extremely high. That’s how it appeared to him then, for he had never
+seen a ship before. This was the ship that was going to swim all the
+way to America. Voices shouted, everything swayed; there was a ladder
+dipping up and down. He went up on his hands and knees in mortal fear
+of falling into the water below, which made a great splashing. He got
+separated from his companion, and when he descended into the bottom of
+that ship his heart seemed to melt suddenly within him.
+
+“It was then also, as he told me, that he lost contact for good and all
+with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about
+through all the little towns in the foothills of his country. They would
+arrive on market days driving in a peasant’s cart, and would set up an
+office in an inn or some other Jew’s house. There were three of them,
+of whom one with a long beard looked venerable; and they had red cloth
+collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government
+officials. They sat proudly behind a long table; and in the next room,
+so that the common people shouldn’t hear, they kept a cunning telegraph
+machine, through which they could talk to the Emperor of America. The
+fathers hung about the door, but the young men of the mountains would
+crowd up to the table asking many questions, for there was work to
+be got all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no
+military service to do.
+
+“But the American Kaiser would not take everybody. Oh, no! He himself
+had a great difficulty in getting accepted, and the venerable man in
+uniform had to go out of the room several times to work the telegraph on
+his behalf. The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, he
+being young and strong. However, many able young men backed out, afraid
+of the great distance; besides, those only who had some money could be
+taken. There were some who sold their huts and their land because it
+cost a lot of money to get to America; but then, once there, you had
+three dollars a day, and if you were clever you could find places where
+true gold could be picked up on the ground. His father’s house was
+getting over full. Two of his brothers were married and had children.
+He promised to send money home from America by post twice a year. His
+father sold an old cow, a pair of piebald mountain ponies of his own
+raising, and a cleared plot of fair pasture land on the sunny slope of
+a pine-clad pass to a Jew inn-keeper in order to pay the people of the
+ship that took men to America to get rich in a short time.
+
+“He must have been a real adventurer at heart, for how many of the
+greatest enterprises in the conquest of the earth had for their
+beginning just such a bargaining away of the paternal cow for the mirage
+or true gold far away! I have been telling you more or less in my own
+words what I learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years,
+during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him.
+He told me this story of his adventure with many flashes of white
+teeth and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anxious
+baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language, with great fluency,
+but always with that singing, soft, and at the same time vibrating
+intonation that instilled a strangely penetrating power into the sound
+of the most familiar English words, as if they had been the words of
+an unearthly language. And he always would come to an end, with many
+emphatic shakes of his head, upon that awful sensation of his heart
+melting within him directly he set foot on board that ship. Afterwards
+there seemed to come for him a period of blank ignorance, at any rate as
+to facts. No doubt he must have been abominably sea-sick and abominably
+unhappy--this soft and passionate adventurer, taken thus out of his
+knowledge, and feeling bitterly as he lay in his emigrant bunk his utter
+loneliness; for his was a highly sensitive nature. The next thing
+we know of him for certain is that he had been hiding in Hammond’s
+pig-pound by the side of the road to Norton six miles, as the crow
+flies, from the sea. Of these experiences he was unwilling to speak:
+they seemed to have seared into his soul a sombre sort of wonder and
+indignation. Through the rumours of the country-side, which lasted for
+a good many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen of West
+Colebrook had been disturbed and startled by heavy knocks against the
+walls of weatherboard cottages, and by a voice crying piercingly strange
+words in the night. Several of them turned out even, but, no doubt, he
+had fled in sudden alarm at their rough angry tones hailing each other
+in the darkness. A sort of frenzy must have helped him up the steep
+Norton hill. It was he, no doubt, who early the following morning had
+been seen lying (in a swoon, I should say) on the roadside grass by the
+Brenzett carrier, who actually got down to have a nearer look, but drew
+back, intimidated by the perfect immobility, and by something queer in
+the aspect of that tramp, sleeping so still under the showers. As the
+day advanced, some children came dashing into school at Norton in such
+a fright that the schoolmistress went out and spoke indignantly to a
+‘horrid-looking man’ on the road. He edged away, hanging his head, for
+a few steps, and then suddenly ran off with extraordinary fleetness.
+The driver of Mr. Bradley’s milk-cart made no secret of it that he had
+lashed with his whip at a hairy sort of gipsy fellow who, jumping up at
+a turn of the road by the Vents, made a snatch at the pony’s bridle. And
+he caught him a good one too, right over the face, he said, that made
+him drop down in the mud a jolly sight quicker than he had jumped up;
+but it was a good half-a-mile before he could stop the pony. Maybe that
+in his desperate endeavours to get help, and in his need to get in touch
+with some one, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart. Also three
+boys confessed afterwards to throwing stones at a funny tramp, knocking
+about all wet and muddy, and, it seemed, very drunk, in the narrow deep
+lane by the limekilns. All this was the talk of three villages for days;
+but we have Mrs. Finn’s (the wife of Smith’s waggoner) unimpeachable
+testimony that she saw him get over the low wall of Hammond’s pig-pound
+and lurch straight at her, babbling aloud in a voice that was enough to
+make one die of fright. Having the baby with her in a perambulator, Mrs.
+Finn called out to him to go away, and as he persisted in coming nearer,
+she hit him courageously with her umbrella over the head and, without
+once looking back, ran like the wind with the perambulator as far as the
+first house in the village. She stopped then, out of breath, and spoke
+to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of stones; and the old chap,
+taking off his immense black wire goggles, got up on his shaky legs
+to look where she pointed. Together they followed with their eyes the
+figure of the man running over a field; they saw him fall down, pick
+himself up, and run on again, staggering and waving his long arms above
+his head, in the direction of the New Barns Farm. From that moment he
+is plainly in the toils of his obscure and touching destiny. There is
+no doubt after this of what happened to him. All is certain now: Mrs.
+Smith’s intense terror; Amy Foster’s stolid conviction held against
+the other’s nervous attack, that the man ‘meant no harm’; Smith’s
+exasperation (on his return from Darnford Market) at finding the dog
+barking himself into a fit, the back-door locked, his wife in hysterics;
+and all for an unfortunate dirty tramp, supposed to be even then lurking
+in his stackyard. Was he? He would teach him to frighten women.
+
+“Smith is notoriously hot-tempered, but the sight of some nondescript
+and miry creature sitting cross-legged amongst a lot of loose straw, and
+swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage, made him pause. Then
+this tramp stood up silently before him, one mass of mud and filth from
+head to foot. Smith, alone amongst his stacks with this apparition, in
+the stormy twilight ringing with the infuriated barking of the dog, felt
+the dread of an inexplicable strangeness. But when that being, parting
+with his black hands the long matted locks that hung before his face, as
+you part the two halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glistening,
+wild, black-and-white eyes, the weirdness of this silent encounter
+fairly staggered him. He had admitted since (for the story has been a
+legitimate subject of conversation about here for years) that he made
+more than one step backwards. Then a sudden burst of rapid, senseless
+speech persuaded him at once that he had to do with an escaped lunatic.
+In fact, that impression never wore off completely. Smith has not in his
+heart given up his secret conviction of the man’s essential insanity to
+this very day.
+
+“As the creature approached him, jabbering in a most discomposing
+manner, Smith (unaware that he was being addressed as ‘gracious lord,’
+and adjured in God’s name to afford food and shelter) kept on speaking
+firmly but gently to it, and retreating all the time into the other
+yard. At last, watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bundled him
+headlong into the wood-lodge, and instantly shot the bolt. Thereupon
+he wiped his brow, though the day was cold. He had done his duty to
+the community by shutting up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac.
+Smith isn’t a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for
+that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself
+whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime,
+at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith
+was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but
+Amy Foster sobbed piteously at the kitchen door, wringing her hands and
+muttering, ‘Don’t! don’t!’ I daresay Smith had a rough time of it that
+evening with one noise and another, and this insane, disturbing voice
+crying obstinately through the door only added to his irritation. He
+couldn’t possibly have connected this troublesome lunatic with the
+sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which there had been a rumour in the
+Darnford marketplace. And I daresay the man inside had been very near
+to insanity on that night. Before his excitement collapsed and he became
+unconscious he was throwing himself violently about in the dark, rolling
+on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with rage, cold, hunger,
+amazement, and despair.
+
+“He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians, and the
+vessel sunk the night before in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship
+_Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea_, of appalling memory.
+
+“A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the
+bogus ‘Emigration Agencies’ among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more
+remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get
+hold of the poor ignorant people’s homesteads, and they were in league
+with the local usurers. They exported their victims through Hamburg
+mostly. As to the ship, I had watched her out of this very window,
+reaching close-hauled under short canvas into the bay on a dark,
+threatening afternoon. She came to an anchor, correctly by the chart,
+off the Brenzett Coastguard station. I remember before the night fell
+looking out again at the outlines of her spars and rigging that stood
+out dark and pointed on a background of ragged, slaty clouds like
+another and a slighter spire to the left of the Brenzett church-tower.
+In the evening the wind rose. At midnight I could hear in my bed the
+terrific gusts and the sounds of a driving deluge.
+
+“About that time the Coastguardmen thought they saw the lights of a
+steamer over the anchoring-ground. In a moment they vanished; but it is
+clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for shelter in the
+bay on that awful, blind night, had rammed the German ship amidships (a
+breach--as one of the divers told me afterwards--‘that you could sail
+a Thames barge through’), and then had gone out either scathless or
+damaged, who shall say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal, to
+perish mysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet
+the hue and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her
+out if she had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.
+
+“A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly
+executed crime, characterise this murderous disaster, which, as you may
+remember, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would have prevented the
+loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no
+time for signals of distress. It was death without any sort of fuss. The
+Hamburg ship, filling all at once, capsized as she sank, and at daylight
+there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She was
+missed, of course, and at first the Coastguardmen surmised that she
+had either dragged her anchor or parted her cable some time during the
+night, and had been blown out to sea. Then, after the tide turned,
+the wreck must have shifted a little and released some of the bodies,
+because a child--a little fair-haired child in a red frock--came ashore
+abreast of the Martello tower. By the afternoon you could see along
+three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out
+of the tumbling foam, and rough-looking men, women with hard faces,
+children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping, on
+stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long procession past the door
+of the ‘Ship Inn,’ to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the
+Brenzett Church.
+
+“Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock is the first
+thing that came ashore from that ship. But I have patients amongst the
+seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I am informed
+that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after
+their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett,
+an ordinary ship’s hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven
+drowned ducks inside. Their families ate the birds, and the hencoop was
+split into firewood with a hatchet. It is possible that a man (supposing
+he happened to be on deck at the time of the accident) might have
+floated ashore on that hencoop. He might. I admit it is improbable, but
+there was the man--and for days, nay, for weeks--it didn’t enter our
+heads that we had amongst us the only living soul that had escaped
+from that disaster. The man himself, even when he learned to speak
+intelligibly, could tell us very little. He remembered he had felt
+better (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and that the darkness,
+the wind, and the rain took his breath away. This looks as if he had
+been on deck some time during that night. But we mustn’t forget he had
+been taken out of his knowledge, that he had been sea-sick and battened
+down below for four days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of
+the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea of what was happening
+to him. The rain, the wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the
+bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain of his wretchedness
+and misery, his heartbroken astonishment that it was neither seen nor
+understood, his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the women
+fierce. He had approached them as a beggar, it is true, he said; but in
+his country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars.
+The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those
+who asked for compassion. Smith’s strategy overcame him completely. The
+wood-lodge presented the horrible aspect of a dungeon. What would be
+done to him next?... No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes
+with the aureole of an angel of light. The girl had not been able to
+sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the
+Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard. Holding the door
+of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him half a loaf of
+white bread--‘such bread as the rich eat in my country,’ he used to say.
+
+“At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts of rubbish, stiff,
+hungry, trembling, miserable, and doubtful. ‘Can you eat this?’
+she asked in her soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for a
+‘gracious lady.’ He devoured ferociously, and tears were falling on the
+crust. Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and imprinted a
+kiss on her hand. She was not frightened. Through his forlorn condition
+she had observed that he was good-looking. She shut the door and walked
+back slowly to the kitchen. Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who
+shuddered at the bare idea of being touched by that creature.
+
+“Through this act of impulsive pity he was brought back again within
+the pale of human relations with his new surroundings. He never forgot
+it--never.
+
+“That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer (Smith’s nearest neighbour)
+came over to give his advice, and ended by carrying him off. He stood,
+unsteady on his legs, meek, and caked over in half-dried mud, while the
+two men talked around him in an incomprehensible tongue. Mrs. Smith had
+refused to come downstairs till the madman was off the premises; Amy
+Foster, far from within the dark kitchen, watched through the open back
+door; and he obeyed the signs that were made to him to the best of his
+ability. But Smith was full of mistrust. ‘Mind, sir! It may be all his
+cunning,’ he cried repeatedly in a tone of warning. When Mr. Swaffer
+started the mare, the deplorable being sitting humbly by his side,
+through weakness, nearly fell out over the back of the high two-wheeled
+cart. Swaffer took him straight home. And it is then that I come upon
+the scene.
+
+“I was called in by the simple process of the old man beckoning to
+me with his forefinger over the gate of his house as I happened to be
+driving past. I got down, of course.
+
+“‘I’ve got something here,’ he mumbled, leading the way to an outhouse
+at a little distance from his other farm-buildings.
+
+“It was there that I saw him first, in a long low room taken upon the
+space of that sort of coach-house. It was bare and whitewashed, with a
+small square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty pane at its further
+end. He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had given him a
+couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the remainder
+of his strength in the exertion of cleaning himself. He was almost
+speechless; his quick breathing under the blankets pulled up to his
+chin, his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird
+caught in a snare. While I was examining him, old Swaffer stood silently
+by the door, passing the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper
+lip. I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine, and
+naturally made some inquiries.
+
+“‘Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns,’ said the old chap in
+his deliberate, unmoved manner, and as if the other had been indeed a
+sort of wild animal. ‘That’s how I came by him. Quite a curiosity, isn’t
+he? Now tell me, doctor--you’ve been all over the world--don’t you think
+that’s a bit of a Hindoo we’ve got hold of here.’
+
+“I was greatly surprised. His long black hair scattered over the straw
+bolster contrasted with the olive pallor of his face. It occurred to
+me he might be a Basque. It didn’t necessarily follow that he should
+understand Spanish; but I tried him with the few words I know, and also
+with some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to
+his lips puzzled me utterly. That afternoon the young ladies from the
+Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had
+struggled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their
+German and Italian on him from the doorway. They retreated, just the
+least bit scared by the flood of passionate speech which, turning on his
+pallet, he let out at them. They admitted that the sound was pleasant,
+soft, musical--but, in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was
+startling--so excitable, so utterly unlike anything one had ever heard.
+The village boys climbed up the bank to have a peep through the little
+square aperture. Everybody was wondering what Mr. Swaffer would do with
+him.
+
+“He simply kept him.
+
+“Swaffer would be called eccentric were he not so much respected. They
+will tell you that Mr. Swaffer sits up as late as ten o’clock at night
+to read books, and they will tell you also that he can write a cheque
+for two hundred pounds without thinking twice about it. He himself would
+tell you that the Swaffers had owned land between this and Darnford for
+these three hundred years. He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does
+not look a bit older than when I first came here. He is a great breeder
+of sheep, and deals extensively in cattle. He attends market days for
+miles around in every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low over
+the reins, his lank grey hair curling over the collar of his warm coat,
+and with a green plaid rug round his legs. The calmness of advanced age
+gives a solemnity to his manner. He is clean-shaved; his lips are thin
+and sensitive; something rigid and monarchal in the set of his features
+lends a certain elevation to the character of his face. He has been
+known to drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody’s
+garden, or a monstrous cabbage grown by a cottager. He loves to hear
+tell of or to be shown something that he calls ‘outlandish.’ Perhaps it
+was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer.
+Perhaps it was only an inexplicable caprice. All I know is that at
+the end of three weeks I caught sight of Smith’s lunatic digging in
+Swaffer’s kitchen garden. They had found out he could use a spade. He
+dug barefooted.
+
+“His black hair flowed over his shoulders. I suppose it was Swaffer
+who had given him the striped old cotton shirt; but he wore still the
+national brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed ashore)
+fitting to the leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern
+belt studded with little brass discs; and had never yet ventured into
+the village. The land he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the
+grounds round a landowner’s house; the size of the cart-horses struck
+him with astonishment; the roads resembled garden walks, and the aspect
+of the people, especially on Sundays, spoke of opulence. He wondered
+what made them so hardhearted and their children so bold. He got
+his food at the back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his
+outhouse, and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign of the
+cross before he began. Beside the same pallet, kneeling in the early
+darkness of the short days, he recited aloud the Lord’s Prayer before he
+slept. Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow with veneration from
+the waist, and stand erect while the old man, with his fingers over his
+upper lip, surveyed him silently. He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who
+kept house frugally for her father--a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman
+of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey,
+steady eye. She was Church--as people said (while her father was one of
+the trustees of the Baptist Chapel)--and wore a little steel cross
+at her waist. She dressed severely in black, in memory of one of the
+innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged
+some twenty-five years ago--a young farmer who broke his neck out
+hunting on the eve of the wedding day. She had the unmoved countenance
+of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like her father’s,
+astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously ironic curl.
+
+“These were the people to whom he owed allegiance, and an overwhelming
+loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without
+sunshine. All the faces were sad. He could talk to no one, and had no
+hope of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these had been the
+faces of people from the other world--dead people--he used to tell me
+years afterwards. Upon my word, I wonder he did not go mad. He didn’t
+know where he was. Somewhere very far from his mountains--somewhere over
+the water. Was this America, he wondered?
+
+“If it hadn’t been for the steel cross at Miss Swaffer’s belt he would
+not, he confessed, have known whether he was in a Christian country at
+all. He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel comforted. There
+was nothing here the same as in his country! The earth and the water
+were different; there were no images of the Redeemer by the roadside.
+The very grass was different, and the trees. All the trees but the three
+old Norway pines on the bit of lawn before Swaffer’s house, and these
+reminded him of his country. He had been detected once, after dusk, with
+his forehead against the trunk of one of them, sobbing, and talking to
+himself. They had been like brothers to him at that time, he affirmed.
+Everything else was strange. Conceive you the kind of an existence
+overshadowed, oppressed, by the everyday material appearances, as if by
+the visions of a nightmare. At night, when he could not sleep, he kept
+on thinking of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he had
+eaten in this foreign land. She had been neither fierce nor angry,
+nor frightened. Her face he remembered as the only comprehensible face
+amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute
+as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond
+the comprehension of the living. I wonder whether the memory of her
+compassion prevented him from cutting his throat. But there! I suppose I
+am an old sentimentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life which
+it takes all the strength of an uncommon despair to overcome.
+
+“He did the work which was given him with an intelligence which
+surprised old Swaffer. By-and-by it was discovered that he could help
+at the ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks in the
+cattle-yard, and was of some use with the sheep. He began to pick up
+words, too, very fast; and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he
+rescued from an untimely death a grand-child of old Swaffer.
+
+“Swaffer’s younger daughter is married to Willcox, a solicitor and the
+Town Clerk of Colebrook. Regularly twice a year they come to stay with
+the old man for a few days. Their only child, a little girl not three
+years old at the time, ran out of the house alone in her little white
+pinafore, and, toddling across the grass of a terraced garden, pitched
+herself over a low wall head first into the horse-pond in the yard below.
+
+“Our man was out with the waggoner and the plough in the field nearest
+to the house, and as he was leading the team round to begin a fresh
+furrow, he saw, through the gap of the gate, what for anybody else
+would have been a mere flutter of something white. But he had
+straight-glancing, quick, far-reaching eyes, that only seemed to flinch
+and lose their amazing power before the immensity of the sea. He was
+barefooted, and looking as outlandish as the heart of Swaffer could
+desire. Leaving the horses on the turn, to the inexpressible disgust
+of the waggoner he bounded off, going over the ploughed ground in long
+leaps, and suddenly appeared before the mother, thrust the child into
+her arms, and strode away.
+
+“The pond was not very deep; but still, if he had not had such good
+eyes, the child would have perished--miserably suffocated in the foot or
+so of sticky mud at the bottom. Old Swaffer walked out slowly into the
+field, waited till the plough came over to his side, had a good look
+at him, and without saying a word went back to the house. But from that
+time they laid out his meals on the kitchen table; and at first, Miss
+Swaffer, all in black and with an inscrutable face, would come and stand
+in the doorway of the living-room to see him make a big sign of the
+cross before he fell to. I believe that from that day, too, Swaffer
+began to pay him regular wages.
+
+“I can’t follow step by step his development. He cut his hair short, was
+seen in the village and along the road going to and fro to his work like
+any other man. Children ceased to shout after him. He became aware of
+social differences, but remained for a long time surprised at the bare
+poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn’t understand
+either why they were kept shut up on week days. There was nothing to
+steal in them. Was it to keep people from praying too often? The rectory
+took much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies
+attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion. They could not,
+however, break him of his habit of crossing himself, but he went so far
+as to take off the string with a couple of brass medals the size of a
+sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of scapulary which he
+wore round his neck. He hung them on the wall by the side of his bed,
+and he was still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord’s Prayer,
+in incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent tone, as he had heard
+his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and
+little, on every evening of his life. And though he wore corduroys at
+work, and a slop-made pepper-and-salt suit on Sundays, strangers would
+turn round to look after him on the road. His foreignness had a peculiar
+and indelible stamp. At last people became used to see him. But
+they never became used to him. His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy
+complexion; his hat cocked on the left ear; his habit, on warm evenings,
+of wearing his coat over one shoulder, like a hussar’s dolman; his
+manner of leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agility, but in the
+ordinary course of progression--all these peculiarities were, as one
+may say, so many causes of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the
+village. _They_ wouldn’t in their dinner hour lie flat on their
+backs on the grass to stare at the sky. Neither did they go about the
+fields screaming dismal tunes. Many times have I heard his high-pitched
+voice from behind the ridge of some sloping sheep-walk, a voice light
+and soaring, like a lark’s, but with a melancholy human note, over
+our fields that hear only the song of birds. And I should be startled
+myself. Ah! He was different: innocent of heart, and full of good will,
+which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into
+another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and
+by an immense ignorance from his future. His quick, fervent utterance
+positively shocked everybody. ‘An excitable devil,’ they called him.
+One evening, in the tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having drunk some
+whisky), he upset them all by singing a love song of his country. They
+hooted him down, and he was pained; but Preble, the lame wheelwright,
+and Vincent, the fat blacksmith, and the other notables too, wanted to
+drink their evening beer in peace. On another occasion he tried to show
+them how to dance. The dust rose in clouds from the sanded floor; he
+leaped straight up amongst the deal tables, struck his heels together,
+squatted on one heel in front of old Preble, shooting out the other
+leg, uttered wild and exulting cries, jumped up to whirl on one foot,
+snapping his fingers above his head--and a strange carter who was having
+a drink in there began to swear, and cleared out with his half-pint
+in his hand into the bar. But when suddenly he sprang upon a table and
+continued to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered. He didn’t
+want any ‘acrobat tricks in the taproom.’ They laid their hands on him.
+Having had a glass or two, Mr. Swaffer’s foreigner tried to expostulate:
+was ejected forcibly: got a black eye.
+
+“I believe he felt the hostility of his human surroundings. But he was
+tough--tough in spirit, too, as well as in body. Only the memory of the
+sea frightened him, with that vague terror that is left by a bad dream.
+His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to America. I had
+often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold
+can be found lying ready and to be got for the trouble of the picking
+up. How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when
+there had been sold a cow, two ponies, and a bit of land to pay for
+his going? His eyes would fill with tears, and, averting them from the
+immense shimmer of the sea, he would throw himself face down on the
+grass. But sometimes, cocking his hat with a little conquering air, he
+would defy my wisdom. He had found his bit of true gold. That was Amy
+Foster’s heart; which was ‘a golden heart, and soft to people’s misery,’
+he would say in the accents of overwhelming conviction.
+
+“He was called Yanko. He had explained that this meant little John; but
+as he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer (some word
+sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall) he got it for his
+surname. And this is the only trace of him that the succeeding ages
+may find in the marriage register of the parish. There it stands--Yanko
+Goorall--in the rector’s handwriting. The crooked cross made by the
+castaway, a cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the most solemn
+part of the whole ceremony, is all that remains now to perpetuate the
+memory of his name.
+
+“His courtship had lasted some time--ever since he got his precarious
+footing in the community. It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green
+satin ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his country. You
+bought a ribbon at a Jew’s stall on a fair-day. I don’t suppose the
+girl knew what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honourable
+intentions could not be mistaken.
+
+“It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I
+fully understood how, for a hundred futile and inappreciable reasons,
+how--shall I say odious?--he was to all the countryside. Every old woman
+in the village was up in arms. Smith, coming upon him near the farm,
+promised to break his head for him if he found him about again. But he
+twisted his little black moustache with such a bellicose air and rolled
+such big, black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing.
+Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man
+who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in
+the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird
+and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand--she
+would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence--and she would run
+out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered
+nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if
+she had been deaf. She and I alone all in the land, I fancy, could see
+his very real beauty. He was very good-looking, and most graceful in
+his bearing, with that something wild as of a woodland creature in his
+aspect. Her mother moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came to
+see her on her day out. The father was surly, but pretended not to know;
+and Mrs. Finn once told her plainly that ‘this man, my dear, will do you
+some harm some day yet.’ And so it went on. They could be seen on the
+roads, she tramping stolidly in her finery--grey dress, black feather,
+stout boots, prominent white cotton gloves that caught your eye a
+hundred yards away; and he, his coat slung picturesquely over one
+shoulder, pacing by her side, gallant of bearing and casting tender
+glances upon the girl with the golden heart. I wonder whether he saw how
+plain she was. Perhaps among types so different from what he had ever
+seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps he was seduced by the
+divine quality of her pity.
+
+“Yanko was in great trouble meantime. In his country you get an old man
+for an ambassador in marriage affairs. He did not know how to proceed.
+However, one day in the midst of sheep in a field (he was now Swaffer’s
+under-shepherd with Foster) he took off his hat to the father and
+declared himself humbly. ‘I daresay she’s fool enough to marry you,’ was
+all Foster said. ‘And then,’ he used to relate, ‘he puts his hat on his
+head, looks black at me as if he wanted to cut my throat, whistles
+the dog, and off he goes, leaving me to do the work.’ The Fosters, of
+course, didn’t like to lose the wages the girl earned: Amy used to give
+all her money to her mother. But there was in Foster a very genuine
+aversion to that match. He contended that the fellow was very good with
+sheep, but was not fit for any girl to marry. For one thing, he used
+to go along the hedges muttering to himself like a dam’ fool; and then,
+these foreigners behave very queerly to women sometimes. And perhaps he
+would want to carry her off somewhere--or run off himself. It was not
+safe. He preached it to his daughter that the fellow might ill-use her
+in some way. She made no answer. It was, they said in the village, as if
+the man had done something to her. People discussed the matter. It was
+quite an excitement, and the two went on ‘walking out’ together in the
+face of opposition. Then something unexpected happened.
+
+“I don’t know whether old Swaffer ever understood how much he was
+regarded in the light of a father by his foreign retainer. Anyway the
+relation was curiously feudal. So when Yanko asked formally for an
+interview--‘and the Miss too’ (he called the severe, deaf Miss Swaffer
+simply _Miss_)--it was to obtain their permission to marry.
+Swaffer heard him unmoved, dismissed him by a nod, and then shouted the
+intelligence into Miss Swaffer’s best ear. She showed no surprise, and
+only remarked grimly, in a veiled blank voice, ‘He certainly won’t get
+any other girl to marry him.’
+
+“It is Miss Swaffer who has all the credit of the munificence: but in
+a very few days it came out that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with
+a cottage (the cottage you’ve seen this morning) and something like an
+acre of ground--had made it over to him in absolute property. Willcox
+expedited the deed, and I remember him telling me he had a great
+pleasure in making it ready. It recited: ‘In consideration of saving the
+life of my beloved grandchild, Bertha Willcox.’
+
+“Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting
+married.
+
+“Her infatuation endured. People saw her going out to meet him in the
+evening. She stared with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where
+he was expected to appear, walking freely, with a swing from the hip,
+and humming one of the love-tunes of his country. When the boy was born,
+he got elevated at the ‘Coach and Horses,’ essayed again a song and a
+dance, and was again ejected. People expressed their commiseration for
+a woman married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn’t care. There was a
+man now (he told me boastfully) to whom he could sing and talk in the
+language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.
+
+“But I don’t know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step,
+heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems
+to me now as if the net of fate had been drawn closer round him already.
+
+“One day I met him on the footpath over the Talfourd Hill. He told me
+that ‘women were funny.’ I had heard already of domestic differences.
+People were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find out what
+sort of man she had married. He looked upon the sea with indifferent,
+unseeing eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day
+as he sat on the doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing
+to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some
+harm. Women are funny. And she had objected to him praying aloud in the
+evening. Why? He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him
+by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child--in
+his own country. And I discovered he longed for their boy to grow up so
+that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our
+ears sounded so disturbing, so passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife
+should dislike the idea he couldn’t tell. But that would pass, he said.
+And tilting his head knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate
+that she had a good heart: not hard, not fierce, open to compassion,
+charitable to the poor!
+
+“I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered whether his difference, his
+strangeness, were not penetrating with repulsion that dull nature they
+had begun by irresistibly attracting. I wondered....”
+
+The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of
+the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the
+hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.
+
+“Physiologically, now,” he said, turning away abruptly, “it was
+possible. It was possible.”
+
+He remained silent. Then went on--“At all events, the next time I saw
+him he was ill--lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he was not
+acclimatised as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of
+course, these mountaineers do get fits of home sickness; and a state
+of depression would make him vulnerable. He was lying half dressed on a
+couch downstairs.
+
+“A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all the middle of the
+little room. There was a wicker cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting
+steam on the hob, and some child’s linen lay drying on the fender. The
+room was warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you noticed
+perhaps.
+
+“He was very feverish, and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a
+chair and looked at him fixedly across the table with her brown, blurred
+eyes. ‘Why don’t you have him upstairs?’ I asked. With a start and a
+confused stammer she said, ‘Oh! ah! I couldn’t sit with him upstairs,
+Sir.’
+
+“I gave her certain directions; and going outside, I said again that
+he ought to be in bed upstairs. She wrung her hands. ‘I couldn’t. I
+couldn’t. He keeps on saying something--I don’t know what.’ With the
+memory of all the talk against the man that had been dinned into her
+ears, I looked at her narrowly. I looked into her shortsighted eyes,
+at her dumb eyes that once in her life had seen an enticing shape, but
+seemed, staring at me, to see nothing at all now. But I saw she was
+uneasy.
+
+“‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked in a sort of vacant
+trepidation. ‘He doesn’t look very ill. I never did see anybody look
+like this before....’
+
+“‘Do you think,’ I asked indignantly, ‘he is shamming?’
+
+“‘I can’t help it, sir,’ she said stolidly. And suddenly she clapped
+her hands and looked right and left. ‘And there’s the baby. I am
+so frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I can’t
+understand what he says to it.’
+
+“‘Can’t you ask a neighbour to come in tonight?’ I asked.
+
+“‘Please, sir, nobody seems to care to come,’ she muttered, dully
+resigned all at once.
+
+“I impressed upon her the necessity of the greatest care, and then had
+to go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter. ‘Oh, I hope he
+won’t talk!’ she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.
+
+“I don’t know how it is I did not see--but I didn’t. And yet, turning
+in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door, very still, and as if
+meditating a flight up the miry road.
+
+“Towards the night his fever increased.
+
+“He tossed, moaned, and now and then muttered a complaint. And she sat
+with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and
+every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she
+could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker
+cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal
+instinct and that unaccountable fear.
+
+“Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he demanded a drink of water. She
+did not move. She had not understood, though he may have thought he
+was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever,
+amazed at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted impatiently,
+‘Water! Give me water!’
+
+“She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child, and stood still. He
+spoke to her, and his passionate remonstrances only increased her
+fear of that strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long time,
+entreating, wondering, pleading, ordering, I suppose. She says she bore
+it as long as she could. And then a gust of rage came over him.
+
+“He sat up and called out terribly one word--some word. Then he got up
+as though he hadn’t been ill at all, she says. And as in fevered dismay,
+indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round the table, she
+simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms. She heard
+him call twice after her down the road in a terrible voice--and
+fled.... Ah! but you should have seen stirring behind the dull,
+blurred glance of these eyes the spectre of the fear which had hunted
+her on that night three miles and a half to the door of Foster’s
+cottage! I did the next day.
+
+“And it was I who found him lying face down and his body in a puddle,
+just outside the little wicket-gate.
+
+“I had been called out that night to an urgent case in the village, and
+on my way home at daybreak passed by the cottage. The door stood open.
+My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The lamp
+smoked, the fire was out, the chill of the stormy night oozed from the
+cheerless yellow paper on the wall. ‘Amy!’ I called aloud, and my voice
+seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had
+cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. ‘Gone!’ he said distinctly. ‘I
+had only asked for water--only for a little water....’
+
+“He was muddy. I covered him up and stood waiting in silence, catching
+a painfully gasped word now and then. They were no longer in his own
+language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. And
+with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild
+creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him.
+She had left him--sick--helpless--thirsty. The spear of the hunter had
+entered his very soul. ‘Why?’ he cried in the penetrating and indignant
+voice of a man calling to a responsible Maker. A gust of wind and a
+swish of rain answered.
+
+“And as I turned away to shut the door he pronounced the word
+‘Merciful!’ and expired.
+
+“Eventually I certified heart-failure as the immediate cause of death.
+His heart must have indeed failed him, or else he might have stood this
+night of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes and drove away.
+Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking sturdily between the
+dripping hedges with his collie at his heels.
+
+“‘Do you know where your daughter is?’ I asked.
+
+“‘Don’t I!’ he cried. ‘I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a
+poor woman like this.’
+
+“‘He won’t frighten her any more,’ I said. ‘He is dead.’
+
+“He struck with his stick at the mud.
+
+“‘And there’s the child.’
+
+“Then, after thinking deeply for a while--“‘I don’t know that it isn’t
+for the best.’
+
+“That’s what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of
+him. Never. Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and
+striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields? He is no
+longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love
+or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as
+a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and
+works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child
+is ‘Amy Foster’s boy.’ She calls him Johnny--which means Little John.
+
+“It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does
+she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy’s cot
+in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on
+his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black
+eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I
+seemed to see again the other one--the father, cast out mysteriously by
+the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMY FOSTER ***
+
+***** This file should be named 495-0.txt or 495-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/9/495/
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’ WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm’s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
+
+The Foundation’s principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation’s web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/495-0.zip b/495-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7c7aa77
--- /dev/null
+++ b/495-0.zip
diff --git a/495-h.zip b/495-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4700eab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/495-h.zip
diff --git a/495-h/495-h.htm b/495-h/495-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c187f36
--- /dev/null
+++ b/495-h/495-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,1626 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Amy Foster
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: June 18, 2009 [EBook #495]
+Last Updated: September 9, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMY FOSTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      AMY FOSTER
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Joseph Conrad
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kennedy is a country doctor, and lives in Colebrook, on the shores of
+      Eastbay. The high ground rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the
+      little town crowds the quaint High Street against the wall which defends
+      it from the sea. Beyond the sea-wall there curves for miles in a vast and
+      regular sweep the barren beach of shingle, with the village of Brenzett
+      standing out darkly across the water, a spire in a clump of trees; and
+      still further out the perpendicular column of a lighthouse, looking in the
+      distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the vanishing-point of the
+      land. The country at the back of Brenzett is low and flat, but the bay is
+      fairly well sheltered from the seas, and occasionally a big ship,
+      windbound or through stress of weather, makes use of the anchoring ground
+      a mile and a half due north from you as you stand at the back door of the
+      &ldquo;Ship Inn&rdquo; in Brenzett. A dilapidated windmill near by lifting its
+      shattered arms from a mound no loftier than a rubbish heap, and a Martello
+      tower squatting at the water&rsquo;s edge half a mile to the south of the
+      Coastguard cottages, are familiar to the skippers of small craft. These
+      are the official seamarks for the patch of trustworthy bottom represented
+      on the Admiralty charts by an irregular oval of dots enclosing several
+      figures six, with a tiny anchor engraved among them, and the legend &ldquo;mud
+      and shells&rdquo; over all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brow of the upland overtops the square tower of the Colebrook Church.
+      The slope is green and looped by a white road. Ascending along this road,
+      you open a valley broad and shallow, a wide green trough of pastures and
+      hedges merging inland into a vista of purple tints and flowing lines
+      closing the view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook and up to Darnford, the
+      market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy.
+      He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards had been the
+      companion of a famous traveller, in the days when there were continents
+      with unexplored interiors. His papers on the fauna and flora made him
+      known to scientific societies. And now he had come to a country practice&mdash;from
+      choice. The penetrating power of his mind, acting like a corrosive fluid,
+      had destroyed his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence is of a scientific
+      order, of an investigating habit, and of that unappeasable curiosity which
+      believes that there is a particle of a general truth in every mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A good many years ago now, on my return from abroad, he invited me to stay
+      with him. I came readily enough, and as he could not neglect his patients
+      to keep me company, he took me on his rounds&mdash;thirty miles or so of
+      an afternoon, sometimes. I waited for him on the roads; the horse reached
+      after the leafy twigs, and, sitting in the dogcart, I could hear Kennedy&rsquo;s
+      laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage. He had a big,
+      hearty laugh that would have fitted a man twice his size, a brisk manner,
+      a bronzed face, and a pair of grey, profoundly attentive eyes. He had the
+      talent of making people talk to him freely, and an inexhaustible patience
+      in listening to their tales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, as we trotted out of a large village into a shady bit of road, I
+      saw on our left hand a low, black cottage, with diamond panes in the
+      windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some roses
+      climbing on the rickety trellis-work of the tiny porch. Kennedy pulled up
+      to a walk. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket over
+      a line stretched between two old apple-trees. And as the bobtailed,
+      long-necked chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand,
+      covered by a thick dog-skin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the
+      hedge: &ldquo;How&rsquo;s your child, Amy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but
+      as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the
+      squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight knot at the
+      back of the head. She looked quite young. With a distinct catch in her
+      breath, her voice sounded low and timid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s well, thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We trotted again. &ldquo;A young patient of yours,&rdquo; I said; and the doctor,
+      flicking the chestnut absently, muttered, &ldquo;Her husband used to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She seems a dull creature,&rdquo; I remarked listlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely,&rdquo; said Kennedy. &ldquo;She is very passive. It&rsquo;s enough to look at
+      the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow,
+      prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind&mdash;an inertness
+      that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises of
+      imagination. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate, such as you see
+      her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She&rsquo;s the daughter of one
+      Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd; the
+      beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with the
+      cook of his widowed father&mdash;a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who
+      passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter
+      threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve
+      as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of their
+      characters. There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler
+      poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that fear of
+      the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads&mdash;over all our
+      heads....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim of the sun, all red in
+      a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near
+      the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant horizon of
+      the sea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy
+      tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in minute pearls of
+      blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen. From the edge of a copse a waggon
+      with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge. Raised above our heads
+      upon the sky-line, it loomed up against the red sun, triumphantly big,
+      enormous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two slow-stepping steeds of
+      legendary proportions. And the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the
+      head of the leading horse projected itself on the background of the
+      Infinite with a heroic uncouthness. The end of his carter&rsquo;s whip quivered
+      high up in the blue. Kennedy discoursed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She&rsquo;s the eldest of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put her
+      out to service at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, the tenant&rsquo;s
+      wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith, a genteel
+      person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I
+      don&rsquo;t know what induced me to notice her at all. There are faces that call
+      your attention by a curious want of definiteness in their whole aspect,
+      as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague shape which, after
+      all, may be nothing more curious or strange than a signpost. The only
+      peculiarity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in her utterance, a
+      sort of preliminary stammer which passes away with the first word. When
+      sharply spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once; but her heart was
+      of the kindest. She had never been heard to express a dislike for a single
+      human being, and she was tender to every living creature. She was devoted
+      to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs.
+      Smith&rsquo;s grey parrot, its peculiarities exercised upon her a positive
+      fascination. Nevertheless, when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat,
+      shrieked for help in human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her
+      ears, and did not prevent the crime. For Mrs. Smith this was another
+      evidence of her stupidity; on the other hand, her want of charm, in view
+      of Smith&rsquo;s well-known frivolousness, was a great recommendation. Her
+      short-sighted eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and
+      she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping
+      a toad in difficulties. If it&rsquo;s true, as some German fellow has said, that
+      without phosphorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there
+      is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had
+      some. She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to
+      be moved by pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room
+      for doubt in the matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of
+      beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar
+      shape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable
+      mystery. She was born in the village, and had never been further away from
+      it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived for four years with the
+      Smiths. New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from the road, and
+      she was content to look day after day at the same fields, hollows, rises;
+      at the trees and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four men about the
+      farm, always the same&mdash;day after day, month after month, year after
+      year. She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed to me,
+      she did not know how to smile. Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she
+      would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large grey hat
+      trimmed with a black feather (I&rsquo;ve seen her in that finery), seize an
+      absurdly slender parasol, climb over two stiles, tramp over three fields
+      and along two hundred yards of road&mdash;never further. There stood
+      Foster&rsquo;s cottage. She would help her mother to give their tea to the
+      younger children, wash up the crockery, kiss the little ones, and go back
+      to the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the change, all the
+      relaxation. She never seemed to wish for anything more. And then she fell
+      in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately&mdash;perhaps helplessly.
+      It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was
+      love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse&mdash;a
+      possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face,
+      by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form
+      under a joyous sky&mdash;and to be awakened at last from that mysterious
+      forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment, from that transport, by a
+      fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a brute....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the sun hanging low on its western limit, the expanse of the
+      grass-lands framed in the counter-scarps of the rising ground took on a
+      gorgeous and sombre aspect. A sense of penetrating sadness, like that
+      inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the silence of
+      the fields. The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with downcast
+      eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-burdened earth had weighted their
+      feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the doctor to my remark, &ldquo;one would think the earth is under a
+      curse, since of all her children these that cling to her the closest are
+      uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their very hearts were loaded
+      with chains. But here on this same road you might have seen amongst these
+      heavy men a being lithe, supple, and long-limbed, straight like a pine
+      with something striving upwards in his appearance as though the heart
+      within him had been buoyant. Perhaps it was only the force of the
+      contrast, but when he was passing one of these villagers here, the soles
+      of his feet did not seem to me to touch the dust of the road. He vaulted
+      over the stiles, paced these slopes with a long elastic stride that made
+      him noticeable at a great distance, and had lustrous black eyes. He was so
+      different from the mankind around that, with his freedom of movement, his
+      soft&mdash;a little startled, glance, his olive complexion and graceful
+      bearing, his humanity suggested to me the nature of a woodland creature.
+      He came from there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor pointed with his whip, and from the summit of the descent seen
+      over the rolling tops of the trees in a park by the side of the road,
+      appeared the level sea far below us, like the floor of an immense edifice
+      inlaid with bands of dark ripple, with still trails of glitter, ending in
+      a belt of glassy water at the foot of the sky. The light blur of smoke,
+      from an invisible steamer, faded on the great clearness of the horizon
+      like the mist of a breath on a mirror; and, inshore, the white sails of a
+      coaster, with the appearance of disentangling themselves slowly from under
+      the branches, floated clear of the foliage of the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shipwrecked in the bay?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; he was a castaway. A poor emigrant from Central Europe bound to
+      America and washed ashore here in a storm. And for him, who knew nothing
+      of the earth, England was an undiscovered country. It was some time before
+      he learned its name; and for all I know he might have expected to find
+      wild beasts or wild men here, when, crawling in the dark over the
+      sea-wall, he rolled down the other side into a dyke, where it was another
+      miracle he didn&rsquo;t get drowned. But he struggled instinctively like an
+      animal under a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into a field. He
+      must have been, indeed, of a tougher fibre than he looked to withstand
+      without expiring such buffetings, the violence of his exertions, and so
+      much fear. Later on, in his broken English that resembled curiously the
+      speech of a young child, he told me himself that he put his trust in God,
+      believing he was no longer in this world. And truly&mdash;he would add&mdash;how
+      was he to know? He fought his way against the rain and the gale on all
+      fours, and crawled at last among some sheep huddled close under the lee of
+      a hedge. They ran off in all directions, bleating in the darkness, and he
+      welcomed the first familiar sound he heard on these shores. It must have
+      been two in the morning then. And this is all we know of the manner of his
+      landing, though he did not arrive unattended by any means. Only his grisly
+      company did not begin to come ashore till much later in the day....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor gathered the reins, clicked his tongue; we trotted down the
+      hill. Then turning, almost directly, a sharp corner into the High Street,
+      we rattled over the stones and were home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late in the evening Kennedy, breaking a spell of moodiness that had come
+      over him, returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he paced the long room
+      from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers
+      on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the windless,
+      scorching day, the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying motionless under
+      the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a
+      footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below&mdash;never a sign of
+      life but the scent of climbing jasmine; and Kennedy&rsquo;s voice, speaking
+      behind me, passed through the wide casement, to vanish outside in a chill
+      and sumptuous stillness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;... The relations of shipwrecks in the olden time tell us of much
+      suffering. Often the castaways were only saved from drowning to die
+      miserably from starvation on a barren coast; others suffered violent death
+      or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence with people
+      to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion, dislike or fear. We
+      read about these things, and they are very pitiful. It is indeed hard upon
+      a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of
+      a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all
+      the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of the world there is
+      not one, it seems to me, that ever had to suffer a fate so simply tragic
+      as the man I am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers cast out by
+      the sea in the bight of this bay, almost within sight from this very
+      window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed, in the course of time we
+      discovered he did not even know that ships had names&mdash;&lsquo;like Christian
+      people&rsquo;; and when, one day, from the top of the Talfourd Hill, he beheld
+      the sea lying open to his view, his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air of
+      wild surprise, as though he had never seen such a sight before. And
+      probably he had not. As far as I could make out, he had been hustled
+      together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth of
+      the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his surroundings, too weary to
+      see anything, too anxious to care. They were driven below into the
+      &lsquo;tweendeck and battened down from the very start. It was a low timber
+      dwelling&mdash;he would say&mdash;with wooden beams overhead, like the
+      houses in his country, but you went into it down a ladder. It was very
+      large, very cold, damp and sombre, with places in the manner of wooden
+      boxes where people had to sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking
+      all ways at once all the time. He crept into one of these boxes and laid
+      down there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before,
+      keeping his bundle and his stick by his side. People groaned, children
+      cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place creaked,
+      and everything was being shaken so that in one&rsquo;s little box one dared not
+      lift one&rsquo;s head. He had lost touch with his only companion (a young man
+      from the same valley, he said), and all the time a great noise of wind
+      went on outside and heavy blows fell&mdash;boom! boom! An awful sickness
+      overcame him, even to the point of making him neglect his prayers.
+      Besides, one could not tell whether it was morning or evening. It seemed
+      always to be night in that place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before that he had been travelling a long, long time on the iron track.
+      He looked out of the window, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it,
+      and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly
+      round and round about him till his head swam. He gave me to understand
+      that he had on his passage beheld uncounted multitudes of people&mdash;whole
+      nations&mdash;all dressed in such clothes as the rich wear. Once he was
+      made to get out of the carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in a
+      house of bricks with his bundle under his head; and once for many hours he
+      had to sit on a floor of flat stones dozing, with his knees up and with
+      his bundle between his feet. There was a roof over him, which seemed made
+      of glass, and was so high that the tallest mountain-pine he had ever seen
+      would have had room to grow under it. Steam-machines rolled in at one end
+      and out at the other. People swarmed more than you can see on a feast-day
+      round the miraculous Holy Image in the yard of the Carmelite Convent down
+      in the plains where, before he left his home, he drove his mother in a
+      wooden cart&mdash;a pious old woman who wanted to offer prayers and make a
+      vow for his safety. He could not give me an idea of how large and lofty
+      and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and clang of iron, the place was,
+      but some one had told him it was called Berlin. Then they rang a bell, and
+      another steam-machine came in, and again he was taken on and on through a
+      land that wearied his eyes by its flatness without a single bit of a hill
+      to be seen anywhere. One more night he spent shut up in a building like a
+      good stable with a litter of straw on the floor, guarding his bundle
+      amongst a lot of men, of whom not one could understand a single word he
+      said. In the morning they were all led down to the stony shores of an
+      extremely broad muddy river, flowing not between hills but between houses
+      that seemed immense. There was a steam-machine that went on the water, and
+      they all stood upon it packed tight, only now there were with them many
+      women and children who made much noise. A cold rain fell, the wind blew in
+      his face; he was wet through, and his teeth chattered. He and the young
+      man from the same valley took each other by the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They thought they were being taken to America straight away, but suddenly
+      the steam-machine bumped against the side of a thing like a house on the
+      water. The walls were smooth and black, and there uprose, growing from the
+      roof as it were, bare trees in the shape of crosses, extremely high.
+      That&rsquo;s how it appeared to him then, for he had never seen a ship before.
+      This was the ship that was going to swim all the way to America. Voices
+      shouted, everything swayed; there was a ladder dipping up and down. He
+      went up on his hands and knees in mortal fear of falling into the water
+      below, which made a great splashing. He got separated from his companion,
+      and when he descended into the bottom of that ship his heart seemed to
+      melt suddenly within him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was then also, as he told me, that he lost contact for good and all
+      with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about
+      through all the little towns in the foothills of his country. They would
+      arrive on market days driving in a peasant&rsquo;s cart, and would set up an
+      office in an inn or some other Jew&rsquo;s house. There were three of them, of
+      whom one with a long beard looked venerable; and they had red cloth
+      collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government
+      officials. They sat proudly behind a long table; and in the next room, so
+      that the common people shouldn&rsquo;t hear, they kept a cunning telegraph
+      machine, through which they could talk to the Emperor of America. The
+      fathers hung about the door, but the young men of the mountains would
+      crowd up to the table asking many questions, for there was work to be got
+      all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no military
+      service to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the American Kaiser would not take everybody. Oh, no! He himself had
+      a great difficulty in getting accepted, and the venerable man in uniform
+      had to go out of the room several times to work the telegraph on his
+      behalf. The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, he being
+      young and strong. However, many able young men backed out, afraid of the
+      great distance; besides, those only who had some money could be taken.
+      There were some who sold their huts and their land because it cost a lot
+      of money to get to America; but then, once there, you had three dollars a
+      day, and if you were clever you could find places where true gold could be
+      picked up on the ground. His father&rsquo;s house was getting over full. Two of
+      his brothers were married and had children. He promised to send money home
+      from America by post twice a year. His father sold an old cow, a pair of
+      piebald mountain ponies of his own raising, and a cleared plot of fair
+      pasture land on the sunny slope of a pine-clad pass to a Jew inn-keeper in
+      order to pay the people of the ship that took men to America to get rich
+      in a short time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He must have been a real adventurer at heart, for how many of the
+      greatest enterprises in the conquest of the earth had for their beginning
+      just such a bargaining away of the paternal cow for the mirage or true
+      gold far away! I have been telling you more or less in my own words what I
+      learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years, during which I
+      seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him. He told me this
+      story of his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and lively glances
+      of black eyes, at first in a sort of anxious baby-talk, then, as he
+      acquired the language, with great fluency, but always with that singing,
+      soft, and at the same time vibrating intonation that instilled a strangely
+      penetrating power into the sound of the most familiar English words, as if
+      they had been the words of an unearthly language. And he always would come
+      to an end, with many emphatic shakes of his head, upon that awful
+      sensation of his heart melting within him directly he set foot on board
+      that ship. Afterwards there seemed to come for him a period of blank
+      ignorance, at any rate as to facts. No doubt he must have been abominably
+      sea-sick and abominably unhappy&mdash;this soft and passionate adventurer,
+      taken thus out of his knowledge, and feeling bitterly as he lay in his
+      emigrant bunk his utter loneliness; for his was a highly sensitive nature.
+      The next thing we know of him for certain is that he had been hiding in
+      Hammond&rsquo;s pig-pound by the side of the road to Norton six miles, as the
+      crow flies, from the sea. Of these experiences he was unwilling to speak:
+      they seemed to have seared into his soul a sombre sort of wonder and
+      indignation. Through the rumours of the country-side, which lasted for a
+      good many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen of West
+      Colebrook had been disturbed and startled by heavy knocks against the
+      walls of weatherboard cottages, and by a voice crying piercingly strange
+      words in the night. Several of them turned out even, but, no doubt, he had
+      fled in sudden alarm at their rough angry tones hailing each other in the
+      darkness. A sort of frenzy must have helped him up the steep Norton hill.
+      It was he, no doubt, who early the following morning had been seen lying
+      (in a swoon, I should say) on the roadside grass by the Brenzett carrier,
+      who actually got down to have a nearer look, but drew back, intimidated by
+      the perfect immobility, and by something queer in the aspect of that
+      tramp, sleeping so still under the showers. As the day advanced, some
+      children came dashing into school at Norton in such a fright that the
+      schoolmistress went out and spoke indignantly to a &lsquo;horrid-looking man&rsquo; on
+      the road. He edged away, hanging his head, for a few steps, and then
+      suddenly ran off with extraordinary fleetness. The driver of Mr. Bradley&rsquo;s
+      milk-cart made no secret of it that he had lashed with his whip at a hairy
+      sort of gipsy fellow who, jumping up at a turn of the road by the Vents,
+      made a snatch at the pony&rsquo;s bridle. And he caught him a good one too,
+      right over the face, he said, that made him drop down in the mud a jolly
+      sight quicker than he had jumped up; but it was a good half-a-mile before
+      he could stop the pony. Maybe that in his desperate endeavours to get
+      help, and in his need to get in touch with some one, the poor devil had
+      tried to stop the cart. Also three boys confessed afterwards to throwing
+      stones at a funny tramp, knocking about all wet and muddy, and, it seemed,
+      very drunk, in the narrow deep lane by the limekilns. All this was the
+      talk of three villages for days; but we have Mrs. Finn&rsquo;s (the wife of
+      Smith&rsquo;s waggoner) unimpeachable testimony that she saw him get over the
+      low wall of Hammond&rsquo;s pig-pound and lurch straight at her, babbling aloud
+      in a voice that was enough to make one die of fright. Having the baby with
+      her in a perambulator, Mrs. Finn called out to him to go away, and as he
+      persisted in coming nearer, she hit him courageously with her umbrella
+      over the head and, without once looking back, ran like the wind with the
+      perambulator as far as the first house in the village. She stopped then,
+      out of breath, and spoke to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of
+      stones; and the old chap, taking off his immense black wire goggles, got
+      up on his shaky legs to look where she pointed. Together they followed
+      with their eyes the figure of the man running over a field; they saw him
+      fall down, pick himself up, and run on again, staggering and waving his
+      long arms above his head, in the direction of the New Barns Farm. From
+      that moment he is plainly in the toils of his obscure and touching
+      destiny. There is no doubt after this of what happened to him. All is
+      certain now: Mrs. Smith&rsquo;s intense terror; Amy Foster&rsquo;s stolid conviction
+      held against the other&rsquo;s nervous attack, that the man &lsquo;meant no harm&rsquo;;
+      Smith&rsquo;s exasperation (on his return from Darnford Market) at finding the
+      dog barking himself into a fit, the back-door locked, his wife in
+      hysterics; and all for an unfortunate dirty tramp, supposed to be even
+      then lurking in his stackyard. Was he? He would teach him to frighten
+      women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smith is notoriously hot-tempered, but the sight of some nondescript and
+      miry creature sitting cross-legged amongst a lot of loose straw, and
+      swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage, made him pause. Then
+      this tramp stood up silently before him, one mass of mud and filth from
+      head to foot. Smith, alone amongst his stacks with this apparition, in the
+      stormy twilight ringing with the infuriated barking of the dog, felt the
+      dread of an inexplicable strangeness. But when that being, parting with
+      his black hands the long matted locks that hung before his face, as you
+      part the two halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glistening, wild,
+      black-and-white eyes, the weirdness of this silent encounter fairly
+      staggered him. He had admitted since (for the story has been a legitimate
+      subject of conversation about here for years) that he made more than one
+      step backwards. Then a sudden burst of rapid, senseless speech persuaded
+      him at once that he had to do with an escaped lunatic. In fact, that
+      impression never wore off completely. Smith has not in his heart given up
+      his secret conviction of the man&rsquo;s essential insanity to this very day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As the creature approached him, jabbering in a most discomposing manner,
+      Smith (unaware that he was being addressed as &lsquo;gracious lord,&rsquo; and adjured
+      in God&rsquo;s name to afford food and shelter) kept on speaking firmly but
+      gently to it, and retreating all the time into the other yard. At last,
+      watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bundled him headlong into the
+      wood-lodge, and instantly shot the bolt. Thereupon he wiped his brow,
+      though the day was cold. He had done his duty to the community by shutting
+      up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac. Smith isn&rsquo;t a hard man at
+      all, but he had room in his brain only for that one idea of lunacy. He was
+      not imaginative enough to ask himself whether the man might not be
+      perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime, at first, the maniac made a
+      great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where
+      she had locked herself in her bedroom; but Amy Foster sobbed piteously at
+      the kitchen door, wringing her hands and muttering, &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t! don&rsquo;t!&rsquo; I
+      daresay Smith had a rough time of it that evening with one noise and
+      another, and this insane, disturbing voice crying obstinately through the
+      door only added to his irritation. He couldn&rsquo;t possibly have connected
+      this troublesome lunatic with the sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which
+      there had been a rumour in the Darnford marketplace. And I daresay the man
+      inside had been very near to insanity on that night. Before his excitement
+      collapsed and he became unconscious he was throwing himself violently
+      about in the dark, rolling on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with
+      rage, cold, hunger, amazement, and despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians, and the
+      vessel sunk the night before in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship <i>Herzogin
+      Sophia-Dorothea</i>, of appalling memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the bogus
+      &lsquo;Emigration Agencies&rsquo; among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more remote
+      provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get hold of
+      the poor ignorant people&rsquo;s homesteads, and they were in league with the
+      local usurers. They exported their victims through Hamburg mostly. As to
+      the ship, I had watched her out of this very window, reaching close-hauled
+      under short canvas into the bay on a dark, threatening afternoon. She came
+      to an anchor, correctly by the chart, off the Brenzett Coastguard station.
+      I remember before the night fell looking out again at the outlines of her
+      spars and rigging that stood out dark and pointed on a background of
+      ragged, slaty clouds like another and a slighter spire to the left of the
+      Brenzett church-tower. In the evening the wind rose. At midnight I could
+      hear in my bed the terrific gusts and the sounds of a driving deluge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About that time the Coastguardmen thought they saw the lights of a
+      steamer over the anchoring-ground. In a moment they vanished; but it is
+      clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for shelter in the bay on
+      that awful, blind night, had rammed the German ship amidships (a breach&mdash;as
+      one of the divers told me afterwards&mdash;&lsquo;that you could sail a Thames
+      barge through&rsquo;), and then had gone out either scathless or damaged, who
+      shall say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal, to perish
+      mysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet the hue
+      and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her out if she
+      had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly
+      executed crime, characterise this murderous disaster, which, as you may
+      remember, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would have prevented the
+      loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no time
+      for signals of distress. It was death without any sort of fuss. The
+      Hamburg ship, filling all at once, capsized as she sank, and at daylight
+      there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She was
+      missed, of course, and at first the Coastguardmen surmised that she had
+      either dragged her anchor or parted her cable some time during the night,
+      and had been blown out to sea. Then, after the tide turned, the wreck must
+      have shifted a little and released some of the bodies, because a child&mdash;a
+      little fair-haired child in a red frock&mdash;came ashore abreast of the
+      Martello tower. By the afternoon you could see along three miles of beach
+      dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out of the tumbling foam, and
+      rough-looking men, women with hard faces, children, mostly fair-haired,
+      were being carried, stiff and dripping, on stretchers, on wattles, on
+      ladders, in a long procession past the door of the &lsquo;Ship Inn,&rsquo; to be laid
+      out in a row under the north wall of the Brenzett Church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock is the first
+      thing that came ashore from that ship. But I have patients amongst the
+      seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I am informed
+      that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after
+      their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett, an
+      ordinary ship&rsquo;s hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven
+      drowned ducks inside. Their families ate the birds, and the hencoop was
+      split into firewood with a hatchet. It is possible that a man (supposing
+      he happened to be on deck at the time of the accident) might have floated
+      ashore on that hencoop. He might. I admit it is improbable, but there was
+      the man&mdash;and for days, nay, for weeks&mdash;it didn&rsquo;t enter our heads
+      that we had amongst us the only living soul that had escaped from that
+      disaster. The man himself, even when he learned to speak intelligibly,
+      could tell us very little. He remembered he had felt better (after the
+      ship had anchored, I suppose), and that the darkness, the wind, and the
+      rain took his breath away. This looks as if he had been on deck some time
+      during that night. But we mustn&rsquo;t forget he had been taken out of his
+      knowledge, that he had been sea-sick and battened down below for four
+      days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of the sea, and therefore
+      could have no definite idea of what was happening to him. The rain, the
+      wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the bleating of the sheep, and
+      he remembered the pain of his wretchedness and misery, his heartbroken
+      astonishment that it was neither seen nor understood, his dismay at
+      finding all the men angry and all the women fierce. He had approached them
+      as a beggar, it is true, he said; but in his country, even if they gave
+      nothing, they spoke gently to beggars. The children in his country were
+      not taught to throw stones at those who asked for compassion. Smith&rsquo;s
+      strategy overcame him completely. The wood-lodge presented the horrible
+      aspect of a dungeon. What would be done to him next?... No wonder that Amy
+      Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel of light. The
+      girl had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the
+      morning, before the Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard.
+      Holding the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him
+      half a loaf of white bread&mdash;&lsquo;such bread as the rich eat in my
+      country,&rsquo; he used to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts of rubbish, stiff,
+      hungry, trembling, miserable, and doubtful. &lsquo;Can you eat this?&rsquo; she asked
+      in her soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for a &lsquo;gracious lady.&rsquo; 
+      He devoured ferociously, and tears were falling on the crust. Suddenly he
+      dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and imprinted a kiss on her hand. She
+      was not frightened. Through his forlorn condition she had observed that he
+      was good-looking. She shut the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen.
+      Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who shuddered at the bare idea of
+      being touched by that creature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Through this act of impulsive pity he was brought back again within the
+      pale of human relations with his new surroundings. He never forgot it&mdash;never.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer (Smith&rsquo;s nearest neighbour) came
+      over to give his advice, and ended by carrying him off. He stood, unsteady
+      on his legs, meek, and caked over in half-dried mud, while the two men
+      talked around him in an incomprehensible tongue. Mrs. Smith had refused to
+      come downstairs till the madman was off the premises; Amy Foster, far from
+      within the dark kitchen, watched through the open back door; and he obeyed
+      the signs that were made to him to the best of his ability. But Smith was
+      full of mistrust. &lsquo;Mind, sir! It may be all his cunning,&rsquo; he cried
+      repeatedly in a tone of warning. When Mr. Swaffer started the mare, the
+      deplorable being sitting humbly by his side, through weakness, nearly fell
+      out over the back of the high two-wheeled cart. Swaffer took him straight
+      home. And it is then that I come upon the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was called in by the simple process of the old man beckoning to me with
+      his forefinger over the gate of his house as I happened to be driving
+      past. I got down, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I&rsquo;ve got something here,&rsquo; he mumbled, leading the way to an outhouse at
+      a little distance from his other farm-buildings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was there that I saw him first, in a long low room taken upon the
+      space of that sort of coach-house. It was bare and whitewashed, with a
+      small square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty pane at its further
+      end. He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had given him a
+      couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the remainder of his
+      strength in the exertion of cleaning himself. He was almost speechless;
+      his quick breathing under the blankets pulled up to his chin, his
+      glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird caught in a
+      snare. While I was examining him, old Swaffer stood silently by the door,
+      passing the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper lip. I gave some
+      directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine, and naturally made some
+      inquiries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns,&rsquo; said the old chap in
+      his deliberate, unmoved manner, and as if the other had been indeed a sort
+      of wild animal. &lsquo;That&rsquo;s how I came by him. Quite a curiosity, isn&rsquo;t he?
+      Now tell me, doctor&mdash;you&rsquo;ve been all over the world&mdash;don&rsquo;t you
+      think that&rsquo;s a bit of a Hindoo we&rsquo;ve got hold of here.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was greatly surprised. His long black hair scattered over the straw
+      bolster contrasted with the olive pallor of his face. It occurred to me he
+      might be a Basque. It didn&rsquo;t necessarily follow that he should understand
+      Spanish; but I tried him with the few words I know, and also with some
+      French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his lips
+      puzzled me utterly. That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one
+      of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with
+      Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and
+      Italian on him from the doorway. They retreated, just the least bit scared
+      by the flood of passionate speech which, turning on his pallet, he let out
+      at them. They admitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical&mdash;but,
+      in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was startling&mdash;so
+      excitable, so utterly unlike anything one had ever heard. The village boys
+      climbed up the bank to have a peep through the little square aperture.
+      Everybody was wondering what Mr. Swaffer would do with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He simply kept him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Swaffer would be called eccentric were he not so much respected. They
+      will tell you that Mr. Swaffer sits up as late as ten o&rsquo;clock at night to
+      read books, and they will tell you also that he can write a cheque for two
+      hundred pounds without thinking twice about it. He himself would tell you
+      that the Swaffers had owned land between this and Darnford for these three
+      hundred years. He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does not look a bit
+      older than when I first came here. He is a great breeder of sheep, and
+      deals extensively in cattle. He attends market days for miles around in
+      every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low over the reins, his
+      lank grey hair curling over the collar of his warm coat, and with a green
+      plaid rug round his legs. The calmness of advanced age gives a solemnity
+      to his manner. He is clean-shaved; his lips are thin and sensitive;
+      something rigid and monarchal in the set of his features lends a certain
+      elevation to the character of his face. He has been known to drive miles
+      in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody&rsquo;s garden, or a monstrous
+      cabbage grown by a cottager. He loves to hear tell of or to be shown
+      something that he calls &lsquo;outlandish.&rsquo; Perhaps it was just that
+      outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer. Perhaps it was
+      only an inexplicable caprice. All I know is that at the end of three weeks
+      I caught sight of Smith&rsquo;s lunatic digging in Swaffer&rsquo;s kitchen garden.
+      They had found out he could use a spade. He dug barefooted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His black hair flowed over his shoulders. I suppose it was Swaffer who
+      had given him the striped old cotton shirt; but he wore still the national
+      brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed ashore) fitting to the
+      leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern belt studded with
+      little brass discs; and had never yet ventured into the village. The land
+      he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the grounds round a
+      landowner&rsquo;s house; the size of the cart-horses struck him with
+      astonishment; the roads resembled garden walks, and the aspect of the
+      people, especially on Sundays, spoke of opulence. He wondered what made
+      them so hardhearted and their children so bold. He got his food at the
+      back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse, and,
+      sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign of the cross before he
+      began. Beside the same pallet, kneeling in the early darkness of the short
+      days, he recited aloud the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer before he slept. Whenever he saw
+      old Swaffer he would bow with veneration from the waist, and stand erect
+      while the old man, with his fingers over his upper lip, surveyed him
+      silently. He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who kept house frugally for her
+      father&mdash;a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five, with the
+      pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey, steady eye. She was Church&mdash;as
+      people said (while her father was one of the trustees of the Baptist
+      Chapel)&mdash;and wore a little steel cross at her waist. She dressed
+      severely in black, in memory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the
+      neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago&mdash;a
+      young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day.
+      She had the unmoved countenance of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her
+      lips, thin like her father&rsquo;s, astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously
+      ironic curl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These were the people to whom he owed allegiance, and an overwhelming
+      loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without
+      sunshine. All the faces were sad. He could talk to no one, and had no hope
+      of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these had been the faces of
+      people from the other world&mdash;dead people&mdash;he used to tell me
+      years afterwards. Upon my word, I wonder he did not go mad. He didn&rsquo;t know
+      where he was. Somewhere very far from his mountains&mdash;somewhere over
+      the water. Was this America, he wondered?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it hadn&rsquo;t been for the steel cross at Miss Swaffer&rsquo;s belt he would
+      not, he confessed, have known whether he was in a Christian country at
+      all. He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel comforted. There was
+      nothing here the same as in his country! The earth and the water were
+      different; there were no images of the Redeemer by the roadside. The very
+      grass was different, and the trees. All the trees but the three old Norway
+      pines on the bit of lawn before Swaffer&rsquo;s house, and these reminded him of
+      his country. He had been detected once, after dusk, with his forehead
+      against the trunk of one of them, sobbing, and talking to himself. They
+      had been like brothers to him at that time, he affirmed. Everything else
+      was strange. Conceive you the kind of an existence overshadowed,
+      oppressed, by the everyday material appearances, as if by the visions of a
+      nightmare. At night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking of the
+      girl who gave him the first piece of bread he had eaten in this foreign
+      land. She had been neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened. Her face he
+      remembered as the only comprehensible face amongst all these faces that
+      were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who
+      are possessed of a knowledge beyond the comprehension of the living. I
+      wonder whether the memory of her compassion prevented him from cutting his
+      throat. But there! I suppose I am an old sentimentalist, and forget the
+      instinctive love of life which it takes all the strength of an uncommon
+      despair to overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did the work which was given him with an intelligence which surprised
+      old Swaffer. By-and-by it was discovered that he could help at the
+      ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks in the cattle-yard, and
+      was of some use with the sheep. He began to pick up words, too, very fast;
+      and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he rescued from an untimely
+      death a grand-child of old Swaffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Swaffer&rsquo;s younger daughter is married to Willcox, a solicitor and the
+      Town Clerk of Colebrook. Regularly twice a year they come to stay with the
+      old man for a few days. Their only child, a little girl not three years
+      old at the time, ran out of the house alone in her little white pinafore,
+      and, toddling across the grass of a terraced garden, pitched herself over
+      a low wall head first into the horse-pond in the yard below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our man was out with the waggoner and the plough in the field nearest to
+      the house, and as he was leading the team round to begin a fresh furrow,
+      he saw, through the gap of the gate, what for anybody else would have been
+      a mere flutter of something white. But he had straight-glancing, quick,
+      far-reaching eyes, that only seemed to flinch and lose their amazing power
+      before the immensity of the sea. He was barefooted, and looking as
+      outlandish as the heart of Swaffer could desire. Leaving the horses on the
+      turn, to the inexpressible disgust of the waggoner he bounded off, going
+      over the ploughed ground in long leaps, and suddenly appeared before the
+      mother, thrust the child into her arms, and strode away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The pond was not very deep; but still, if he had not had such good eyes,
+      the child would have perished&mdash;miserably suffocated in the foot or so
+      of sticky mud at the bottom. Old Swaffer walked out slowly into the field,
+      waited till the plough came over to his side, had a good look at him, and
+      without saying a word went back to the house. But from that time they laid
+      out his meals on the kitchen table; and at first, Miss Swaffer, all in
+      black and with an inscrutable face, would come and stand in the doorway of
+      the living-room to see him make a big sign of the cross before he fell to.
+      I believe that from that day, too, Swaffer began to pay him regular wages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can&rsquo;t follow step by step his development. He cut his hair short, was
+      seen in the village and along the road going to and fro to his work like
+      any other man. Children ceased to shout after him. He became aware of
+      social differences, but remained for a long time surprised at the bare
+      poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn&rsquo;t understand
+      either why they were kept shut up on week days. There was nothing to steal
+      in them. Was it to keep people from praying too often? The rectory took
+      much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies
+      attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion. They could not,
+      however, break him of his habit of crossing himself, but he went so far as
+      to take off the string with a couple of brass medals the size of a
+      sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of scapulary which he wore
+      round his neck. He hung them on the wall by the side of his bed, and he
+      was still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer, in
+      incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent tone, as he had heard his
+      old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and little, on
+      every evening of his life. And though he wore corduroys at work, and a
+      slop-made pepper-and-salt suit on Sundays, strangers would turn round to
+      look after him on the road. His foreignness had a peculiar and indelible
+      stamp. At last people became used to see him. But they never became used
+      to him. His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy complexion; his hat cocked
+      on the left ear; his habit, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one
+      shoulder, like a hussar&rsquo;s dolman; his manner of leaping over the stiles,
+      not as a feat of agility, but in the ordinary course of progression&mdash;all
+      these peculiarities were, as one may say, so many causes of scorn and
+      offence to the inhabitants of the village. <i>They</i> wouldn&rsquo;t in their
+      dinner hour lie flat on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky.
+      Neither did they go about the fields screaming dismal tunes. Many times
+      have I heard his high-pitched voice from behind the ridge of some sloping
+      sheep-walk, a voice light and soaring, like a lark&rsquo;s, but with a
+      melancholy human note, over our fields that hear only the song of birds.
+      And I should be startled myself. Ah! He was different: innocent of heart,
+      and full of good will, which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a
+      man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space
+      from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future. His quick,
+      fervent utterance positively shocked everybody. &lsquo;An excitable devil,&rsquo; they
+      called him. One evening, in the tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having
+      drunk some whisky), he upset them all by singing a love song of his
+      country. They hooted him down, and he was pained; but Preble, the lame
+      wheelwright, and Vincent, the fat blacksmith, and the other notables too,
+      wanted to drink their evening beer in peace. On another occasion he tried
+      to show them how to dance. The dust rose in clouds from the sanded floor;
+      he leaped straight up amongst the deal tables, struck his heels together,
+      squatted on one heel in front of old Preble, shooting out the other leg,
+      uttered wild and exulting cries, jumped up to whirl on one foot, snapping
+      his fingers above his head&mdash;and a strange carter who was having a
+      drink in there began to swear, and cleared out with his half-pint in his
+      hand into the bar. But when suddenly he sprang upon a table and continued
+      to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered. He didn&rsquo;t want any
+      &lsquo;acrobat tricks in the taproom.&rsquo; They laid their hands on him. Having had
+      a glass or two, Mr. Swaffer&rsquo;s foreigner tried to expostulate: was ejected
+      forcibly: got a black eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe he felt the hostility of his human surroundings. But he was
+      tough&mdash;tough in spirit, too, as well as in body. Only the memory of
+      the sea frightened him, with that vague terror that is left by a bad
+      dream. His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to America. I
+      had often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold
+      can be found lying ready and to be got for the trouble of the picking up.
+      How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when there
+      had been sold a cow, two ponies, and a bit of land to pay for his going?
+      His eyes would fill with tears, and, averting them from the immense
+      shimmer of the sea, he would throw himself face down on the grass. But
+      sometimes, cocking his hat with a little conquering air, he would defy my
+      wisdom. He had found his bit of true gold. That was Amy Foster&rsquo;s heart;
+      which was &lsquo;a golden heart, and soft to people&rsquo;s misery,&rsquo; he would say in
+      the accents of overwhelming conviction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was called Yanko. He had explained that this meant little John; but as
+      he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer (some word
+      sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall) he got it for his
+      surname. And this is the only trace of him that the succeeding ages may
+      find in the marriage register of the parish. There it stands&mdash;Yanko
+      Goorall&mdash;in the rector&rsquo;s handwriting. The crooked cross made by the
+      castaway, a cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the most solemn
+      part of the whole ceremony, is all that remains now to perpetuate the
+      memory of his name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His courtship had lasted some time&mdash;ever since he got his precarious
+      footing in the community. It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green
+      satin ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his country. You bought
+      a ribbon at a Jew&rsquo;s stall on a fair-day. I don&rsquo;t suppose the girl knew
+      what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honourable intentions
+      could not be mistaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I fully
+      understood how, for a hundred futile and inappreciable reasons, how&mdash;shall
+      I say odious?&mdash;he was to all the countryside. Every old woman in the
+      village was up in arms. Smith, coming upon him near the farm, promised to
+      break his head for him if he found him about again. But he twisted his
+      little black moustache with such a bellicose air and rolled such big,
+      black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing. Smith,
+      however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was
+      surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in the gloaming
+      whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird and mournful
+      tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand&mdash;she would leave
+      Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence&mdash;and she would run out to his
+      call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered nothing. She
+      said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if she had been
+      deaf. She and I alone all in the land, I fancy, could see his very real
+      beauty. He was very good-looking, and most graceful in his bearing, with
+      that something wild as of a woodland creature in his aspect. Her mother
+      moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came to see her on her day out.
+      The father was surly, but pretended not to know; and Mrs. Finn once told
+      her plainly that &lsquo;this man, my dear, will do you some harm some day yet.&rsquo; 
+      And so it went on. They could be seen on the roads, she tramping stolidly
+      in her finery&mdash;grey dress, black feather, stout boots, prominent
+      white cotton gloves that caught your eye a hundred yards away; and he, his
+      coat slung picturesquely over one shoulder, pacing by her side, gallant of
+      bearing and casting tender glances upon the girl with the golden heart. I
+      wonder whether he saw how plain she was. Perhaps among types so different
+      from what he had ever seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps he
+      was seduced by the divine quality of her pity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yanko was in great trouble meantime. In his country you get an old man
+      for an ambassador in marriage affairs. He did not know how to proceed.
+      However, one day in the midst of sheep in a field (he was now Swaffer&rsquo;s
+      under-shepherd with Foster) he took off his hat to the father and declared
+      himself humbly. &lsquo;I daresay she&rsquo;s fool enough to marry you,&rsquo; was all Foster
+      said. &lsquo;And then,&rsquo; he used to relate, &lsquo;he puts his hat on his head, looks
+      black at me as if he wanted to cut my throat, whistles the dog, and off he
+      goes, leaving me to do the work.&rsquo; The Fosters, of course, didn&rsquo;t like to
+      lose the wages the girl earned: Amy used to give all her money to her
+      mother. But there was in Foster a very genuine aversion to that match. He
+      contended that the fellow was very good with sheep, but was not fit for
+      any girl to marry. For one thing, he used to go along the hedges muttering
+      to himself like a dam&rsquo; fool; and then, these foreigners behave very
+      queerly to women sometimes. And perhaps he would want to carry her off
+      somewhere&mdash;or run off himself. It was not safe. He preached it to his
+      daughter that the fellow might ill-use her in some way. She made no
+      answer. It was, they said in the village, as if the man had done something
+      to her. People discussed the matter. It was quite an excitement, and the
+      two went on &lsquo;walking out&rsquo; together in the face of opposition. Then
+      something unexpected happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know whether old Swaffer ever understood how much he was regarded
+      in the light of a father by his foreign retainer. Anyway the relation was
+      curiously feudal. So when Yanko asked formally for an interview&mdash;&lsquo;and
+      the Miss too&rsquo; (he called the severe, deaf Miss Swaffer simply <i>Miss</i>)&mdash;it
+      was to obtain their permission to marry. Swaffer heard him unmoved,
+      dismissed him by a nod, and then shouted the intelligence into Miss
+      Swaffer&rsquo;s best ear. She showed no surprise, and only remarked grimly, in a
+      veiled blank voice, &lsquo;He certainly won&rsquo;t get any other girl to marry him.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is Miss Swaffer who has all the credit of the munificence: but in a
+      very few days it came out that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with a
+      cottage (the cottage you&rsquo;ve seen this morning) and something like an acre
+      of ground&mdash;had made it over to him in absolute property. Willcox
+      expedited the deed, and I remember him telling me he had a great pleasure
+      in making it ready. It recited: &lsquo;In consideration of saving the life of my
+      beloved grandchild, Bertha Willcox.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting
+      married.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her infatuation endured. People saw her going out to meet him in the
+      evening. She stared with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where he
+      was expected to appear, walking freely, with a swing from the hip, and
+      humming one of the love-tunes of his country. When the boy was born, he
+      got elevated at the &lsquo;Coach and Horses,&rsquo; essayed again a song and a dance,
+      and was again ejected. People expressed their commiseration for a woman
+      married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn&rsquo;t care. There was a man now (he
+      told me boastfully) to whom he could sing and talk in the language of his
+      country, and show how to dance by-and-by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step,
+      heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems to
+      me now as if the net of fate had been drawn closer round him already.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One day I met him on the footpath over the Talfourd Hill. He told me that
+      &lsquo;women were funny.&rsquo; I had heard already of domestic differences. People
+      were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find out what sort of man she
+      had married. He looked upon the sea with indifferent, unseeing eyes. His
+      wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day as he sat on the
+      doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing to babies in his
+      mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some harm. Women are funny.
+      And she had objected to him praying aloud in the evening. Why? He expected
+      the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him by-and-by, as he used to do
+      after his old father when he was a child&mdash;in his own country. And I
+      discovered he longed for their boy to grow up so that he could have a man
+      to talk with in that language that to our ears sounded so disturbing, so
+      passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife should dislike the idea he
+      couldn&rsquo;t tell. But that would pass, he said. And tilting his head
+      knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate that she had a good heart:
+      not hard, not fierce, open to compassion, charitable to the poor!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered whether his difference, his
+      strangeness, were not penetrating with repulsion that dull nature they had
+      begun by irresistibly attracting. I wondered....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of
+      the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the
+      hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Physiologically, now,&rdquo; he said, turning away abruptly, &ldquo;it was possible.
+      It was possible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He remained silent. Then went on&mdash;&ldquo;At all events, the next time I saw
+      him he was ill&mdash;lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he was not
+      acclimatised as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of
+      course, these mountaineers do get fits of home sickness; and a state of
+      depression would make him vulnerable. He was lying half dressed on a couch
+      downstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all the middle of the little
+      room. There was a wicker cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting steam on
+      the hob, and some child&rsquo;s linen lay drying on the fender. The room was
+      warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you noticed perhaps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was very feverish, and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a
+      chair and looked at him fixedly across the table with her brown, blurred
+      eyes. &lsquo;Why don&rsquo;t you have him upstairs?&rsquo; I asked. With a start and a
+      confused stammer she said, &lsquo;Oh! ah! I couldn&rsquo;t sit with him upstairs,
+      Sir.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I gave her certain directions; and going outside, I said again that he
+      ought to be in bed upstairs. She wrung her hands. &lsquo;I couldn&rsquo;t. I couldn&rsquo;t.
+      He keeps on saying something&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know what.&rsquo; With the memory of
+      all the talk against the man that had been dinned into her ears, I looked
+      at her narrowly. I looked into her shortsighted eyes, at her dumb eyes
+      that once in her life had seen an enticing shape, but seemed, staring at
+      me, to see nothing at all now. But I saw she was uneasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;What&rsquo;s the matter with him?&rsquo; she asked in a sort of vacant trepidation.
+      &lsquo;He doesn&rsquo;t look very ill. I never did see anybody look like this
+      before....&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Do you think,&rsquo; I asked indignantly, &lsquo;he is shamming?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I can&rsquo;t help it, sir,&rsquo; she said stolidly. And suddenly she clapped her
+      hands and looked right and left. &lsquo;And there&rsquo;s the baby. I am so
+      frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I can&rsquo;t understand
+      what he says to it.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Can&rsquo;t you ask a neighbour to come in tonight?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Please, sir, nobody seems to care to come,&rsquo; she muttered, dully resigned
+      all at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I impressed upon her the necessity of the greatest care, and then had to
+      go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter. &lsquo;Oh, I hope he won&rsquo;t
+      talk!&rsquo; she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how it is I did not see&mdash;but I didn&rsquo;t. And yet, turning
+      in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door, very still, and as if
+      meditating a flight up the miry road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Towards the night his fever increased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He tossed, moaned, and now and then muttered a complaint. And she sat
+      with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and
+      every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she
+      could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker cradle
+      close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal instinct
+      and that unaccountable fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he demanded a drink of water. She
+      did not move. She had not understood, though he may have thought he was
+      speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever, amazed
+      at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted impatiently, &lsquo;Water!
+      Give me water!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child, and stood still. He spoke
+      to her, and his passionate remonstrances only increased her fear of that
+      strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long time, entreating,
+      wondering, pleading, ordering, I suppose. She says she bore it as long as
+      she could. And then a gust of rage came over him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He sat up and called out terribly one word&mdash;some word. Then he got
+      up as though he hadn&rsquo;t been ill at all, she says. And as in fevered
+      dismay, indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round the table,
+      she simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms. She
+      heard him call twice after her down the road in a terrible voice&mdash;and
+      fled.... Ah! but you should have seen stirring behind the dull, blurred
+      glance of these eyes the spectre of the fear which had hunted her on that
+      night three miles and a half to the door of Foster&rsquo;s cottage! I did the
+      next day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it was I who found him lying face down and his body in a puddle, just
+      outside the little wicket-gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had been called out that night to an urgent case in the village, and on
+      my way home at daybreak passed by the cottage. The door stood open. My man
+      helped me to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The lamp smoked, the
+      fire was out, the chill of the stormy night oozed from the cheerless
+      yellow paper on the wall. &lsquo;Amy!&rsquo; I called aloud, and my voice seemed to
+      lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had cried in a
+      desert. He opened his eyes. &lsquo;Gone!&rsquo; he said distinctly. &lsquo;I had only asked
+      for water&mdash;only for a little water....&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was muddy. I covered him up and stood waiting in silence, catching a
+      painfully gasped word now and then. They were no longer in his own
+      language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. And
+      with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild
+      creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him. She
+      had left him&mdash;sick&mdash;helpless&mdash;thirsty. The spear of the
+      hunter had entered his very soul. &lsquo;Why?&rsquo; he cried in the penetrating and
+      indignant voice of a man calling to a responsible Maker. A gust of wind
+      and a swish of rain answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And as I turned away to shut the door he pronounced the word &lsquo;Merciful!&rsquo; 
+      and expired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eventually I certified heart-failure as the immediate cause of death. His
+      heart must have indeed failed him, or else he might have stood this night
+      of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes and drove away. Not very far
+      from the cottage I met Foster walking sturdily between the dripping hedges
+      with his collie at his heels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Do you know where your daughter is?&rsquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t I!&rsquo; he cried. &lsquo;I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a poor
+      woman like this.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;He won&rsquo;t frighten her any more,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;He is dead.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He struck with his stick at the mud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;And there&rsquo;s the child.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, after thinking deeply for a while&mdash;&ldquo;&lsquo;I don&rsquo;t know that it
+      isn&rsquo;t for the best.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of him.
+      Never. Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and
+      striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields? He is no
+      longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love or
+      fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a
+      shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works
+      for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is &lsquo;Amy
+      Foster&rsquo;s boy.&rsquo; She calls him Johnny&mdash;which means Little John.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does
+      she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy&rsquo;s cot in
+      a very passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on his
+      back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes,
+      with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I seemed
+      to see again the other one&mdash;the father, cast out mysteriously by the
+      sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair.&rdquo; <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMY FOSTER ***
+
+***** This file should be named 495-h.htm or 495-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/9/495/
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
+ 
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you &lsquo;AS-IS&rsquo; WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm&rsquo;s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation&rsquo;s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state&rsquo;s laws.
+
+The Foundation&rsquo;s principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation&rsquo;s web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/495.zip b/495.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c2559f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/495.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..030a202
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #495 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/495)
diff --git a/old/495.txt b/old/495.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9507f33
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/495.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1495 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Amy Foster
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #495]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMY FOSTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+AMY FOSTER
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+Kennedy is a country doctor, and lives in Colebrook, on the shores of
+Eastbay. The high ground rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the
+little town crowds the quaint High Street against the wall which defends
+it from the sea. Beyond the sea-wall there curves for miles in a vast
+and regular sweep the barren beach of shingle, with the village of
+Brenzett standing out darkly across the water, a spire in a clump of
+trees; and still further out the perpendicular column of a lighthouse,
+looking in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the
+vanishing-point of the land. The country at the back of Brenzett is
+low and flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and
+occasionally a big ship, windbound or through stress of weather, makes
+use of the anchoring ground a mile and a half due north from you as
+you stand at the back door of the "Ship Inn" in Brenzett. A dilapidated
+windmill near by lifting its shattered arms from a mound no loftier than
+a rubbish heap, and a Martello tower squatting at the water's edge half
+a mile to the south of the Coastguard cottages, are familiar to the
+skippers of small craft. These are the official seamarks for the
+patch of trustworthy bottom represented on the Admiralty charts by an
+irregular oval of dots enclosing several figures six, with a tiny anchor
+engraved among them, and the legend "mud and shells" over all.
+
+The brow of the upland overtops the square tower of the Colebrook
+Church. The slope is green and looped by a white road. Ascending along
+this road, you open a valley broad and shallow, a wide green trough
+of pastures and hedges merging inland into a vista of purple tints and
+flowing lines closing the view.
+
+In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook and up to Darnford, the
+market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy.
+He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards had been the
+companion of a famous traveller, in the days when there were continents
+with unexplored interiors. His papers on the fauna and flora made him
+known to scientific societies. And now he had come to a country
+practice--from choice. The penetrating power of his mind, acting like
+a corrosive fluid, had destroyed his ambition, I fancy. His intelligence
+is of a scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of that
+unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a particle of a
+general truth in every mystery.
+
+A good many years ago now, on my return from abroad, he invited me to
+stay with him. I came readily enough, and as he could not neglect his
+patients to keep me company, he took me on his rounds--thirty miles or
+so of an afternoon, sometimes. I waited for him on the roads; the horse
+reached after the leafy twigs, and, sitting in the dogcart, I could hear
+Kennedy's laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage. He
+had a big, hearty laugh that would have fitted a man twice his size, a
+brisk manner, a bronzed face, and a pair of grey, profoundly attentive
+eyes. He had the talent of making people talk to him freely, and an
+inexhaustible patience in listening to their tales.
+
+One day, as we trotted out of a large village into a shady bit of road,
+I saw on our left hand a low, black cottage, with diamond panes in the
+windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some roses
+climbing on the rickety trellis-work of the tiny porch. Kennedy pulled
+up to a walk. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket
+over a line stretched between two old apple-trees. And as the bobtailed,
+long-necked chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand,
+covered by a thick dog-skin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the
+hedge: "How's your child, Amy?"
+
+I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but
+as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the
+squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight knot at
+the back of the head. She looked quite young. With a distinct catch in
+her breath, her voice sounded low and timid.
+
+"He's well, thank you."
+
+We trotted again. "A young patient of yours," I said; and the doctor,
+flicking the chestnut absently, muttered, "Her husband used to be."
+
+"She seems a dull creature," I remarked listlessly.
+
+"Precisely," said Kennedy. "She is very passive. It's enough to look
+at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow,
+prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind--an inertness
+that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises
+of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate, such as you
+see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She's the daughter
+of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd;
+the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with
+the cook of his widowed father--a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who
+passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter
+threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to
+serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of
+their characters. There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a
+subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that
+fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads--over all our
+heads. . . ."
+
+The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim of the sun, all red
+in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed
+rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant
+horizon of the sea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed
+with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in
+minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen. From the edge
+of a copse a waggon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge.
+Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed up against the red
+sun, triumphantly big, enormous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two
+slow-stepping steeds of legendary proportions. And the clumsy figure of
+the man plodding at the head of the leading horse projected itself on
+the background of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness. The end of his
+carter's whip quivered high up in the blue. Kennedy discoursed.
+
+"She's the eldest of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put
+her out to service at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, the
+tenant's wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith,
+a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every
+afternoon. I don't know what induced me to notice her at all. There
+are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness
+in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at
+a vague shape which, after all, may be nothing more curious or strange
+than a signpost. The only peculiarity I perceived in her was a slight
+hesitation in her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer which passes
+away with the first word. When sharply spoken to, she was apt to lose
+her head at once; but her heart was of the kindest. She had never been
+heard to express a dislike for a single human being, and she was tender
+to every living creature. She was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith,
+to their dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs. Smith's grey parrot, its
+peculiarities exercised upon her a positive fascination. Nevertheless,
+when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in
+human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did
+not prevent the crime. For Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her
+stupidity; on the other hand, her want of charm, in view of Smith's
+well-known frivolousness, was a great recommendation. Her short-sighted
+eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been
+seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping a toad in
+difficulties. If it's true, as some German fellow has said, that without
+phosphorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there is no
+kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had some.
+She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be
+moved by pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room
+for doubt in the matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of
+beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar
+shape.
+
+"How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable
+mystery. She was born in the village, and had never been further away
+from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived for four years
+with the Smiths. New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from
+the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields,
+hollows, rises; at the trees and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four
+men about the farm, always the same--day after day, month after month,
+year after year. She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it
+seemed to me, she did not know how to smile. Sometimes of a fine Sunday
+afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a
+large grey hat trimmed with a black feather (I've seen her in that
+finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb over two stiles, tramp
+over three fields and along two hundred yards of road--never further.
+There stood Foster's cottage. She would help her mother to give their
+tea to the younger children, wash up the crockery, kiss the little ones,
+and go back to the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the change, all
+the relaxation. She never seemed to wish for anything more. And then
+she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately--perhaps
+helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful
+spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and
+fateful impulse--a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and
+possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a
+pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky--and to be awakened at last
+from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment,
+from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a
+brute. . . ."
+
+With the sun hanging low on its western limit, the expanse of the
+grass-lands framed in the counter-scarps of the rising ground took on
+a gorgeous and sombre aspect. A sense of penetrating sadness, like that
+inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the silence
+of the fields. The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with downcast
+eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-burdened earth had weighted their
+feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances.
+
+"Yes," said the doctor to my remark, "one would think the earth is under
+a curse, since of all her children these that cling to her the closest
+are uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their very hearts were
+loaded with chains. But here on this same road you might have seen
+amongst these heavy men a being lithe, supple, and long-limbed, straight
+like a pine with something striving upwards in his appearance as though
+the heart within him had been buoyant. Perhaps it was only the force of
+the contrast, but when he was passing one of these villagers here, the
+soles of his feet did not seem to me to touch the dust of the road. He
+vaulted over the stiles, paced these slopes with a long elastic stride
+that made him noticeable at a great distance, and had lustrous black
+eyes. He was so different from the mankind around that, with his freedom
+of movement, his soft--a little startled, glance, his olive complexion
+and graceful bearing, his humanity suggested to me the nature of a
+woodland creature. He came from there."
+
+The doctor pointed with his whip, and from the summit of the descent
+seen over the rolling tops of the trees in a park by the side of the
+road, appeared the level sea far below us, like the floor of an immense
+edifice inlaid with bands of dark ripple, with still trails of glitter,
+ending in a belt of glassy water at the foot of the sky. The light blur
+of smoke, from an invisible steamer, faded on the great clearness of the
+horizon like the mist of a breath on a mirror; and, inshore, the white
+sails of a coaster, with the appearance of disentangling themselves
+slowly from under the branches, floated clear of the foliage of the
+trees.
+
+"Shipwrecked in the bay?" I said.
+
+"Yes; he was a castaway. A poor emigrant from Central Europe bound to
+America and washed ashore here in a storm. And for him, who knew nothing
+of the earth, England was an undiscovered country. It was some time
+before he learned its name; and for all I know he might have expected to
+find wild beasts or wild men here, when, crawling in the dark over
+the sea-wall, he rolled down the other side into a dyke, where it was
+another miracle he didn't get drowned. But he struggled instinctively
+like an animal under a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into
+a field. He must have been, indeed, of a tougher fibre than he looked
+to withstand without expiring such buffetings, the violence of his
+exertions, and so much fear. Later on, in his broken English that
+resembled curiously the speech of a young child, he told me himself that
+he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer in this world. And
+truly--he would add--how was he to know? He fought his way against the
+rain and the gale on all fours, and crawled at last among some sheep
+huddled close under the lee of a hedge. They ran off in all directions,
+bleating in the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar sound he
+heard on these shores. It must have been two in the morning then. And
+this is all we know of the manner of his landing, though he did not
+arrive unattended by any means. Only his grisly company did not begin to
+come ashore till much later in the day. . . ."
+
+The doctor gathered the reins, clicked his tongue; we trotted down
+the hill. Then turning, almost directly, a sharp corner into the High
+Street, we rattled over the stones and were home.
+
+Late in the evening Kennedy, breaking a spell of moodiness that had come
+over him, returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he paced the long
+room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the
+papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after
+the windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a hazy sea lying
+motionless under the moon. Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir
+of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth
+below--never a sign of life but the scent of climbing jasmine; and
+Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me, passed through the wide casement,
+to vanish outside in a chill and sumptuous stillness.
+
+". . . The relations of shipwrecks in the olden time tell us of much
+suffering. Often the castaways were only saved from drowning to die
+miserably from starvation on a barren coast; others suffered violent
+death or else slavery, passing through years of precarious existence
+with people to whom their strangeness was an object of suspicion,
+dislike or fear. We read about these things, and they are very pitiful.
+It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless,
+incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of
+the earth. Yet amongst all the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild
+parts of the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to
+suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am speaking of, the most
+innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay,
+almost within sight from this very window.
+
+"He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed, in the course of time we
+discovered he did not even know that ships had names--'like Christian
+people'; and when, one day, from the top of the Talfourd Hill, he beheld
+the sea lying open to his view, his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air
+of wild surprise, as though he had never seen such a sight before. And
+probably he had not. As far as I could make out, he had been hustled
+together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth
+of the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his surroundings, too weary
+to see anything, too anxious to care. They were driven below into the
+'tweendeck and battened down from the very start. It was a low timber
+dwelling--he would say--with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in
+his country, but you went into it down a ladder. It was very large, very
+cold, damp and sombre, with places in the manner of wooden boxes where
+people had to sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all ways
+at once all the time. He crept into one of these boxes and laid down
+there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before,
+keeping his bundle and his stick by his side. People groaned, children
+cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place
+creaked, and everything was being shaken so that in one's little box one
+dared not lift one's head. He had lost touch with his only companion (a
+young man from the same valley, he said), and all the time a great
+noise of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell--boom! boom! An awful
+sickness overcame him, even to the point of making him neglect his
+prayers. Besides, one could not tell whether it was morning or evening.
+It seemed always to be night in that place.
+
+"Before that he had been travelling a long, long time on the iron track.
+He looked out of the window, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it,
+and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly
+round and round about him till his head swam. He gave me to understand
+that he had on his passage beheld uncounted multitudes of people--whole
+nations--all dressed in such clothes as the rich wear. Once he was made
+to get out of the carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in a
+house of bricks with his bundle under his head; and once for many hours
+he had to sit on a floor of flat stones dozing, with his knees up and
+with his bundle between his feet. There was a roof over him, which
+seemed made of glass, and was so high that the tallest mountain-pine
+he had ever seen would have had room to grow under it. Steam-machines
+rolled in at one end and out at the other. People swarmed more than you
+can see on a feast-day round the miraculous Holy Image in the yard of
+the Carmelite Convent down in the plains where, before he left his home,
+he drove his mother in a wooden cart--a pious old woman who wanted to
+offer prayers and make a vow for his safety. He could not give me an
+idea of how large and lofty and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and
+clang of iron, the place was, but some one had told him it was called
+Berlin. Then they rang a bell, and another steam-machine came in, and
+again he was taken on and on through a land that wearied his eyes by its
+flatness without a single bit of a hill to be seen anywhere. One more
+night he spent shut up in a building like a good stable with a litter
+of straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a lot of men, of whom
+not one could understand a single word he said. In the morning they
+were all led down to the stony shores of an extremely broad muddy river,
+flowing not between hills but between houses that seemed immense. There
+was a steam-machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it
+packed tight, only now there were with them many women and children who
+made much noise. A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face; he was
+wet through, and his teeth chattered. He and the young man from the same
+valley took each other by the hand.
+
+"They thought they were being taken to America straight away, but
+suddenly the steam-machine bumped against the side of a thing like a
+house on the water. The walls were smooth and black, and there uprose,
+growing from the roof as it were, bare trees in the shape of crosses,
+extremely high. That's how it appeared to him then, for he had never
+seen a ship before. This was the ship that was going to swim all the
+way to America. Voices shouted, everything swayed; there was a ladder
+dipping up and down. He went up on his hands and knees in mortal fear
+of falling into the water below, which made a great splashing. He got
+separated from his companion, and when he descended into the bottom of
+that ship his heart seemed to melt suddenly within him.
+
+"It was then also, as he told me, that he lost contact for good and all
+with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about
+through all the little towns in the foothills of his country. They would
+arrive on market days driving in a peasant's cart, and would set up an
+office in an inn or some other Jew's house. There were three of them,
+of whom one with a long beard looked venerable; and they had red cloth
+collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government
+officials. They sat proudly behind a long table; and in the next room,
+so that the common people shouldn't hear, they kept a cunning telegraph
+machine, through which they could talk to the Emperor of America. The
+fathers hung about the door, but the young men of the mountains would
+crowd up to the table asking many questions, for there was work to
+be got all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no
+military service to do.
+
+"But the American Kaiser would not take everybody. Oh, no! He himself
+had a great difficulty in getting accepted, and the venerable man in
+uniform had to go out of the room several times to work the telegraph on
+his behalf. The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, he
+being young and strong. However, many able young men backed out, afraid
+of the great distance; besides, those only who had some money could be
+taken. There were some who sold their huts and their land because it
+cost a lot of money to get to America; but then, once there, you had
+three dollars a day, and if you were clever you could find places where
+true gold could be picked up on the ground. His father's house was
+getting over full. Two of his brothers were married and had children.
+He promised to send money home from America by post twice a year. His
+father sold an old cow, a pair of piebald mountain ponies of his own
+raising, and a cleared plot of fair pasture land on the sunny slope of
+a pine-clad pass to a Jew inn-keeper in order to pay the people of the
+ship that took men to America to get rich in a short time.
+
+"He must have been a real adventurer at heart, for how many of the
+greatest enterprises in the conquest of the earth had for their
+beginning just such a bargaining away of the paternal cow for the mirage
+or true gold far away! I have been telling you more or less in my own
+words what I learned fragmentarily in the course of two or three years,
+during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a friendly chat with him.
+He told me this story of his adventure with many flashes of white
+teeth and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anxious
+baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language, with great fluency,
+but always with that singing, soft, and at the same time vibrating
+intonation that instilled a strangely penetrating power into the sound
+of the most familiar English words, as if they had been the words of
+an unearthly language. And he always would come to an end, with many
+emphatic shakes of his head, upon that awful sensation of his heart
+melting within him directly he set foot on board that ship. Afterwards
+there seemed to come for him a period of blank ignorance, at any rate as
+to facts. No doubt he must have been abominably sea-sick and abominably
+unhappy--this soft and passionate adventurer, taken thus out of his
+knowledge, and feeling bitterly as he lay in his emigrant bunk his utter
+loneliness; for his was a highly sensitive nature. The next thing
+we know of him for certain is that he had been hiding in Hammond's
+pig-pound by the side of the road to Norton six miles, as the crow
+flies, from the sea. Of these experiences he was unwilling to speak:
+they seemed to have seared into his soul a sombre sort of wonder and
+indignation. Through the rumours of the country-side, which lasted for
+a good many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen of West
+Colebrook had been disturbed and startled by heavy knocks against the
+walls of weatherboard cottages, and by a voice crying piercingly strange
+words in the night. Several of them turned out even, but, no doubt, he
+had fled in sudden alarm at their rough angry tones hailing each other
+in the darkness. A sort of frenzy must have helped him up the steep
+Norton hill. It was he, no doubt, who early the following morning had
+been seen lying (in a swoon, I should say) on the roadside grass by the
+Brenzett carrier, who actually got down to have a nearer look, but drew
+back, intimidated by the perfect immobility, and by something queer in
+the aspect of that tramp, sleeping so still under the showers. As the
+day advanced, some children came dashing into school at Norton in such
+a fright that the schoolmistress went out and spoke indignantly to a
+'horrid-looking man' on the road. He edged away, hanging his head, for
+a few steps, and then suddenly ran off with extraordinary fleetness.
+The driver of Mr. Bradley's milk-cart made no secret of it that he had
+lashed with his whip at a hairy sort of gipsy fellow who, jumping up at
+a turn of the road by the Vents, made a snatch at the pony's bridle. And
+he caught him a good one too, right over the face, he said, that made
+him drop down in the mud a jolly sight quicker than he had jumped up;
+but it was a good half-a-mile before he could stop the pony. Maybe that
+in his desperate endeavours to get help, and in his need to get in touch
+with some one, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart. Also three
+boys confessed afterwards to throwing stones at a funny tramp, knocking
+about all wet and muddy, and, it seemed, very drunk, in the narrow deep
+lane by the limekilns. All this was the talk of three villages for days;
+but we have Mrs. Finn's (the wife of Smith's waggoner) unimpeachable
+testimony that she saw him get over the low wall of Hammond's pig-pound
+and lurch straight at her, babbling aloud in a voice that was enough to
+make one die of fright. Having the baby with her in a perambulator, Mrs.
+Finn called out to him to go away, and as he persisted in coming nearer,
+she hit him courageously with her umbrella over the head and, without
+once looking back, ran like the wind with the perambulator as far as the
+first house in the village. She stopped then, out of breath, and spoke
+to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of stones; and the old chap,
+taking off his immense black wire goggles, got up on his shaky legs
+to look where she pointed. Together they followed with their eyes the
+figure of the man running over a field; they saw him fall down, pick
+himself up, and run on again, staggering and waving his long arms above
+his head, in the direction of the New Barns Farm. From that moment he
+is plainly in the toils of his obscure and touching destiny. There is
+no doubt after this of what happened to him. All is certain now: Mrs.
+Smith's intense terror; Amy Foster's stolid conviction held against
+the other's nervous attack, that the man 'meant no harm'; Smith's
+exasperation (on his return from Darnford Market) at finding the dog
+barking himself into a fit, the back-door locked, his wife in hysterics;
+and all for an unfortunate dirty tramp, supposed to be even then lurking
+in his stackyard. Was he? He would teach him to frighten women.
+
+"Smith is notoriously hot-tempered, but the sight of some nondescript
+and miry creature sitting cross-legged amongst a lot of loose straw, and
+swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage, made him pause. Then
+this tramp stood up silently before him, one mass of mud and filth from
+head to foot. Smith, alone amongst his stacks with this apparition, in
+the stormy twilight ringing with the infuriated barking of the dog, felt
+the dread of an inexplicable strangeness. But when that being, parting
+with his black hands the long matted locks that hung before his face, as
+you part the two halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glistening,
+wild, black-and-white eyes, the weirdness of this silent encounter
+fairly staggered him. He had admitted since (for the story has been a
+legitimate subject of conversation about here for years) that he made
+more than one step backwards. Then a sudden burst of rapid, senseless
+speech persuaded him at once that he had to do with an escaped lunatic.
+In fact, that impression never wore off completely. Smith has not in his
+heart given up his secret conviction of the man's essential insanity to
+this very day.
+
+"As the creature approached him, jabbering in a most discomposing
+manner, Smith (unaware that he was being addressed as 'gracious lord,'
+and adjured in God's name to afford food and shelter) kept on speaking
+firmly but gently to it, and retreating all the time into the other
+yard. At last, watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bundled him
+headlong into the wood-lodge, and instantly shot the bolt. Thereupon
+he wiped his brow, though the day was cold. He had done his duty to
+the community by shutting up a wandering and probably dangerous maniac.
+Smith isn't a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only for
+that one idea of lunacy. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself
+whether the man might not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime,
+at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the lodge. Mrs. Smith
+was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but
+Amy Foster sobbed piteously at the kitchen door, wringing her hands and
+muttering, 'Don't! don't!' I daresay Smith had a rough time of it that
+evening with one noise and another, and this insane, disturbing voice
+crying obstinately through the door only added to his irritation. He
+couldn't possibly have connected this troublesome lunatic with the
+sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which there had been a rumour in the
+Darnford marketplace. And I daresay the man inside had been very near
+to insanity on that night. Before his excitement collapsed and he became
+unconscious he was throwing himself violently about in the dark, rolling
+on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with rage, cold, hunger,
+amazement, and despair.
+
+"He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of the Carpathians, and the
+vessel sunk the night before in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship
+_Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea_, of appalling memory.
+
+"A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the
+bogus 'Emigration Agencies' among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more
+remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get
+hold of the poor ignorant people's homesteads, and they were in league
+with the local usurers. They exported their victims through Hamburg
+mostly. As to the ship, I had watched her out of this very window,
+reaching close-hauled under short canvas into the bay on a dark,
+threatening afternoon. She came to an anchor, correctly by the chart,
+off the Brenzett Coastguard station. I remember before the night fell
+looking out again at the outlines of her spars and rigging that stood
+out dark and pointed on a background of ragged, slaty clouds like
+another and a slighter spire to the left of the Brenzett church-tower.
+In the evening the wind rose. At midnight I could hear in my bed the
+terrific gusts and the sounds of a driving deluge.
+
+"About that time the Coastguardmen thought they saw the lights of a
+steamer over the anchoring-ground. In a moment they vanished; but it is
+clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for shelter in the
+bay on that awful, blind night, had rammed the German ship amidships (a
+breach--as one of the divers told me afterwards--'that you could sail
+a Thames barge through'), and then had gone out either scathless or
+damaged, who shall say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal, to
+perish mysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet
+the hue and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her
+out if she had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.
+
+"A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly
+executed crime, characterise this murderous disaster, which, as you may
+remember, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would have prevented the
+loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no
+time for signals of distress. It was death without any sort of fuss. The
+Hamburg ship, filling all at once, capsized as she sank, and at daylight
+there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She was
+missed, of course, and at first the Coastguardmen surmised that she
+had either dragged her anchor or parted her cable some time during the
+night, and had been blown out to sea. Then, after the tide turned,
+the wreck must have shifted a little and released some of the bodies,
+because a child--a little fair-haired child in a red frock--came ashore
+abreast of the Martello tower. By the afternoon you could see along
+three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out
+of the tumbling foam, and rough-looking men, women with hard faces,
+children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping, on
+stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long procession past the door
+of the 'Ship Inn,' to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the
+Brenzett Church.
+
+"Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock is the first
+thing that came ashore from that ship. But I have patients amongst the
+seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I am informed
+that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after
+their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett,
+an ordinary ship's hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven
+drowned ducks inside. Their families ate the birds, and the hencoop was
+split into firewood with a hatchet. It is possible that a man (supposing
+he happened to be on deck at the time of the accident) might have
+floated ashore on that hencoop. He might. I admit it is improbable, but
+there was the man--and for days, nay, for weeks--it didn't enter our
+heads that we had amongst us the only living soul that had escaped
+from that disaster. The man himself, even when he learned to speak
+intelligibly, could tell us very little. He remembered he had felt
+better (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and that the darkness,
+the wind, and the rain took his breath away. This looks as if he had
+been on deck some time during that night. But we mustn't forget he had
+been taken out of his knowledge, that he had been sea-sick and battened
+down below for four days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of
+the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea of what was happening
+to him. The rain, the wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the
+bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain of his wretchedness
+and misery, his heartbroken astonishment that it was neither seen nor
+understood, his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the women
+fierce. He had approached them as a beggar, it is true, he said; but in
+his country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars.
+The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those
+who asked for compassion. Smith's strategy overcame him completely. The
+wood-lodge presented the horrible aspect of a dungeon. What would be
+done to him next? . . . No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes
+with the aureole of an angel of light. The girl had not been able to
+sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the
+Smiths were up, she slipped out across the back yard. Holding the door
+of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and extended to him half a loaf of
+white bread--'such bread as the rich eat in my country,' he used to say.
+
+"At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts of rubbish, stiff,
+hungry, trembling, miserable, and doubtful. 'Can you eat this?'
+she asked in her soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for a
+'gracious lady.' He devoured ferociously, and tears were falling on the
+crust. Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and imprinted a
+kiss on her hand. She was not frightened. Through his forlorn condition
+she had observed that he was good-looking. She shut the door and walked
+back slowly to the kitchen. Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who
+shuddered at the bare idea of being touched by that creature.
+
+"Through this act of impulsive pity he was brought back again within
+the pale of human relations with his new surroundings. He never forgot
+it--never.
+
+"That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer (Smith's nearest neighbour)
+came over to give his advice, and ended by carrying him off. He stood,
+unsteady on his legs, meek, and caked over in half-dried mud, while the
+two men talked around him in an incomprehensible tongue. Mrs. Smith had
+refused to come downstairs till the madman was off the premises; Amy
+Foster, far from within the dark kitchen, watched through the open back
+door; and he obeyed the signs that were made to him to the best of his
+ability. But Smith was full of mistrust. 'Mind, sir! It may be all his
+cunning,' he cried repeatedly in a tone of warning. When Mr. Swaffer
+started the mare, the deplorable being sitting humbly by his side,
+through weakness, nearly fell out over the back of the high two-wheeled
+cart. Swaffer took him straight home. And it is then that I come upon
+the scene.
+
+"I was called in by the simple process of the old man beckoning to
+me with his forefinger over the gate of his house as I happened to be
+driving past. I got down, of course.
+
+"'I've got something here,' he mumbled, leading the way to an outhouse
+at a little distance from his other farm-buildings.
+
+"It was there that I saw him first, in a long low room taken upon the
+space of that sort of coach-house. It was bare and whitewashed, with a
+small square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty pane at its further
+end. He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had given him a
+couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the remainder
+of his strength in the exertion of cleaning himself. He was almost
+speechless; his quick breathing under the blankets pulled up to his
+chin, his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird
+caught in a snare. While I was examining him, old Swaffer stood silently
+by the door, passing the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper
+lip. I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine, and
+naturally made some inquiries.
+
+"'Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns,' said the old chap in
+his deliberate, unmoved manner, and as if the other had been indeed a
+sort of wild animal. 'That's how I came by him. Quite a curiosity, isn't
+he? Now tell me, doctor--you've been all over the world--don't you think
+that's a bit of a Hindoo we've got hold of here.'
+
+"I was greatly surprised. His long black hair scattered over the straw
+bolster contrasted with the olive pallor of his face. It occurred to
+me he might be a Basque. It didn't necessarily follow that he should
+understand Spanish; but I tried him with the few words I know, and also
+with some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to
+his lips puzzled me utterly. That afternoon the young ladies from the
+Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had
+struggled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their
+German and Italian on him from the doorway. They retreated, just the
+least bit scared by the flood of passionate speech which, turning on his
+pallet, he let out at them. They admitted that the sound was pleasant,
+soft, musical--but, in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was
+startling--so excitable, so utterly unlike anything one had ever heard.
+The village boys climbed up the bank to have a peep through the little
+square aperture. Everybody was wondering what Mr. Swaffer would do with
+him.
+
+"He simply kept him.
+
+"Swaffer would be called eccentric were he not so much respected. They
+will tell you that Mr. Swaffer sits up as late as ten o'clock at night
+to read books, and they will tell you also that he can write a cheque
+for two hundred pounds without thinking twice about it. He himself would
+tell you that the Swaffers had owned land between this and Darnford for
+these three hundred years. He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does
+not look a bit older than when I first came here. He is a great breeder
+of sheep, and deals extensively in cattle. He attends market days for
+miles around in every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low over
+the reins, his lank grey hair curling over the collar of his warm coat,
+and with a green plaid rug round his legs. The calmness of advanced age
+gives a solemnity to his manner. He is clean-shaved; his lips are thin
+and sensitive; something rigid and monarchal in the set of his features
+lends a certain elevation to the character of his face. He has been
+known to drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody's
+garden, or a monstrous cabbage grown by a cottager. He loves to hear
+tell of or to be shown something that he calls 'outlandish.' Perhaps it
+was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer.
+Perhaps it was only an inexplicable caprice. All I know is that at
+the end of three weeks I caught sight of Smith's lunatic digging in
+Swaffer's kitchen garden. They had found out he could use a spade. He
+dug barefooted.
+
+"His black hair flowed over his shoulders. I suppose it was Swaffer
+who had given him the striped old cotton shirt; but he wore still the
+national brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed ashore)
+fitting to the leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern
+belt studded with little brass discs; and had never yet ventured into
+the village. The land he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the
+grounds round a landowner's house; the size of the cart-horses struck
+him with astonishment; the roads resembled garden walks, and the aspect
+of the people, especially on Sundays, spoke of opulence. He wondered
+what made them so hardhearted and their children so bold. He got
+his food at the back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his
+outhouse, and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign of the
+cross before he began. Beside the same pallet, kneeling in the early
+darkness of the short days, he recited aloud the Lord's Prayer before he
+slept. Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow with veneration from
+the waist, and stand erect while the old man, with his fingers over his
+upper lip, surveyed him silently. He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who
+kept house frugally for her father--a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman
+of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey,
+steady eye. She was Church--as people said (while her father was one of
+the trustees of the Baptist Chapel)--and wore a little steel cross
+at her waist. She dressed severely in black, in memory of one of the
+innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged
+some twenty-five years ago--a young farmer who broke his neck out
+hunting on the eve of the wedding day. She had the unmoved countenance
+of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like her father's,
+astonished one sometimes by a mysteriously ironic curl.
+
+"These were the people to whom he owed allegiance, and an overwhelming
+loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without
+sunshine. All the faces were sad. He could talk to no one, and had no
+hope of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these had been the
+faces of people from the other world--dead people--he used to tell me
+years afterwards. Upon my word, I wonder he did not go mad. He didn't
+know where he was. Somewhere very far from his mountains--somewhere over
+the water. Was this America, he wondered?
+
+"If it hadn't been for the steel cross at Miss Swaffer's belt he would
+not, he confessed, have known whether he was in a Christian country at
+all. He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel comforted. There
+was nothing here the same as in his country! The earth and the water
+were different; there were no images of the Redeemer by the roadside.
+The very grass was different, and the trees. All the trees but the three
+old Norway pines on the bit of lawn before Swaffer's house, and these
+reminded him of his country. He had been detected once, after dusk, with
+his forehead against the trunk of one of them, sobbing, and talking to
+himself. They had been like brothers to him at that time, he affirmed.
+Everything else was strange. Conceive you the kind of an existence
+overshadowed, oppressed, by the everyday material appearances, as if by
+the visions of a nightmare. At night, when he could not sleep, he kept
+on thinking of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he had
+eaten in this foreign land. She had been neither fierce nor angry,
+nor frightened. Her face he remembered as the only comprehensible face
+amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, and as mute
+as the faces of the dead who are possessed of a knowledge beyond
+the comprehension of the living. I wonder whether the memory of her
+compassion prevented him from cutting his throat. But there! I suppose I
+am an old sentimentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life which
+it takes all the strength of an uncommon despair to overcome.
+
+"He did the work which was given him with an intelligence which
+surprised old Swaffer. By-and-by it was discovered that he could help
+at the ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks in the
+cattle-yard, and was of some use with the sheep. He began to pick up
+words, too, very fast; and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he
+rescued from an untimely death a grand-child of old Swaffer.
+
+"Swaffer's younger daughter is married to Willcox, a solicitor and the
+Town Clerk of Colebrook. Regularly twice a year they come to stay with
+the old man for a few days. Their only child, a little girl not three
+years old at the time, ran out of the house alone in her little white
+pinafore, and, toddling across the grass of a terraced garden, pitched
+herself over a low wall head first into the horse-pond in the yard below.
+
+"Our man was out with the waggoner and the plough in the field nearest
+to the house, and as he was leading the team round to begin a fresh
+furrow, he saw, through the gap of the gate, what for anybody else
+would have been a mere flutter of something white. But he had
+straight-glancing, quick, far-reaching eyes, that only seemed to flinch
+and lose their amazing power before the immensity of the sea. He was
+barefooted, and looking as outlandish as the heart of Swaffer could
+desire. Leaving the horses on the turn, to the inexpressible disgust
+of the waggoner he bounded off, going over the ploughed ground in long
+leaps, and suddenly appeared before the mother, thrust the child into
+her arms, and strode away.
+
+"The pond was not very deep; but still, if he had not had such good
+eyes, the child would have perished--miserably suffocated in the foot or
+so of sticky mud at the bottom. Old Swaffer walked out slowly into the
+field, waited till the plough came over to his side, had a good look
+at him, and without saying a word went back to the house. But from that
+time they laid out his meals on the kitchen table; and at first, Miss
+Swaffer, all in black and with an inscrutable face, would come and stand
+in the doorway of the living-room to see him make a big sign of the
+cross before he fell to. I believe that from that day, too, Swaffer
+began to pay him regular wages.
+
+"I can't follow step by step his development. He cut his hair short, was
+seen in the village and along the road going to and fro to his work like
+any other man. Children ceased to shout after him. He became aware of
+social differences, but remained for a long time surprised at the bare
+poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn't understand
+either why they were kept shut up on week days. There was nothing to
+steal in them. Was it to keep people from praying too often? The rectory
+took much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies
+attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion. They could not,
+however, break him of his habit of crossing himself, but he went so far
+as to take off the string with a couple of brass medals the size of a
+sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of scapulary which he
+wore round his neck. He hung them on the wall by the side of his bed,
+and he was still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord's Prayer,
+in incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent tone, as he had heard
+his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and
+little, on every evening of his life. And though he wore corduroys at
+work, and a slop-made pepper-and-salt suit on Sundays, strangers would
+turn round to look after him on the road. His foreignness had a peculiar
+and indelible stamp. At last people became used to see him. But
+they never became used to him. His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy
+complexion; his hat cocked on the left ear; his habit, on warm evenings,
+of wearing his coat over one shoulder, like a hussar's dolman; his
+manner of leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agility, but in the
+ordinary course of progression--all these peculiarities were, as one
+may say, so many causes of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the
+village. _They_ wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat on their
+backs on the grass to stare at the sky. Neither did they go about the
+fields screaming dismal tunes. Many times have I heard his high-pitched
+voice from behind the ridge of some sloping sheep-walk, a voice light
+and soaring, like a lark's, but with a melancholy human note, over
+our fields that hear only the song of birds. And I should be startled
+myself. Ah! He was different: innocent of heart, and full of good will,
+which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into
+another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and
+by an immense ignorance from his future. His quick, fervent utterance
+positively shocked everybody. 'An excitable devil,' they called him.
+One evening, in the tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having drunk some
+whisky), he upset them all by singing a love song of his country. They
+hooted him down, and he was pained; but Preble, the lame wheelwright,
+and Vincent, the fat blacksmith, and the other notables too, wanted to
+drink their evening beer in peace. On another occasion he tried to show
+them how to dance. The dust rose in clouds from the sanded floor; he
+leaped straight up amongst the deal tables, struck his heels together,
+squatted on one heel in front of old Preble, shooting out the other
+leg, uttered wild and exulting cries, jumped up to whirl on one foot,
+snapping his fingers above his head--and a strange carter who was having
+a drink in there began to swear, and cleared out with his half-pint
+in his hand into the bar. But when suddenly he sprang upon a table and
+continued to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered. He didn't
+want any 'acrobat tricks in the taproom.' They laid their hands on him.
+Having had a glass or two, Mr. Swaffer's foreigner tried to expostulate:
+was ejected forcibly: got a black eye.
+
+"I believe he felt the hostility of his human surroundings. But he was
+tough--tough in spirit, too, as well as in body. Only the memory of the
+sea frightened him, with that vague terror that is left by a bad dream.
+His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to America. I had
+often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold
+can be found lying ready and to be got for the trouble of the picking
+up. How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when
+there had been sold a cow, two ponies, and a bit of land to pay for
+his going? His eyes would fill with tears, and, averting them from the
+immense shimmer of the sea, he would throw himself face down on the
+grass. But sometimes, cocking his hat with a little conquering air, he
+would defy my wisdom. He had found his bit of true gold. That was Amy
+Foster's heart; which was 'a golden heart, and soft to people's misery,'
+he would say in the accents of overwhelming conviction.
+
+"He was called Yanko. He had explained that this meant little John; but
+as he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer (some word
+sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall) he got it for his
+surname. And this is the only trace of him that the succeeding ages
+may find in the marriage register of the parish. There it stands--Yanko
+Goorall--in the rector's handwriting. The crooked cross made by the
+castaway, a cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the most solemn
+part of the whole ceremony, is all that remains now to perpetuate the
+memory of his name.
+
+"His courtship had lasted some time--ever since he got his precarious
+footing in the community. It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green
+satin ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his country. You
+bought a ribbon at a Jew's stall on a fair-day. I don't suppose the
+girl knew what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honourable
+intentions could not be mistaken.
+
+"It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I
+fully understood how, for a hundred futile and inappreciable reasons,
+how--shall I say odious?--he was to all the countryside. Every old woman
+in the village was up in arms. Smith, coming upon him near the farm,
+promised to break his head for him if he found him about again. But he
+twisted his little black moustache with such a bellicose air and rolled
+such big, black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing.
+Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man
+who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in
+the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird
+and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand--she
+would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence--and she would run
+out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered
+nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if
+she had been deaf. She and I alone all in the land, I fancy, could see
+his very real beauty. He was very good-looking, and most graceful in
+his bearing, with that something wild as of a woodland creature in his
+aspect. Her mother moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came to
+see her on her day out. The father was surly, but pretended not to know;
+and Mrs. Finn once told her plainly that 'this man, my dear, will do you
+some harm some day yet.' And so it went on. They could be seen on the
+roads, she tramping stolidly in her finery--grey dress, black feather,
+stout boots, prominent white cotton gloves that caught your eye a
+hundred yards away; and he, his coat slung picturesquely over one
+shoulder, pacing by her side, gallant of bearing and casting tender
+glances upon the girl with the golden heart. I wonder whether he saw how
+plain she was. Perhaps among types so different from what he had ever
+seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps he was seduced by the
+divine quality of her pity.
+
+"Yanko was in great trouble meantime. In his country you get an old man
+for an ambassador in marriage affairs. He did not know how to proceed.
+However, one day in the midst of sheep in a field (he was now Swaffer's
+under-shepherd with Foster) he took off his hat to the father and
+declared himself humbly. 'I daresay she's fool enough to marry you,' was
+all Foster said. 'And then,' he used to relate, 'he puts his hat on his
+head, looks black at me as if he wanted to cut my throat, whistles
+the dog, and off he goes, leaving me to do the work.' The Fosters, of
+course, didn't like to lose the wages the girl earned: Amy used to give
+all her money to her mother. But there was in Foster a very genuine
+aversion to that match. He contended that the fellow was very good with
+sheep, but was not fit for any girl to marry. For one thing, he used
+to go along the hedges muttering to himself like a dam' fool; and then,
+these foreigners behave very queerly to women sometimes. And perhaps he
+would want to carry her off somewhere--or run off himself. It was not
+safe. He preached it to his daughter that the fellow might ill-use her
+in some way. She made no answer. It was, they said in the village, as if
+the man had done something to her. People discussed the matter. It was
+quite an excitement, and the two went on 'walking out' together in the
+face of opposition. Then something unexpected happened.
+
+"I don't know whether old Swaffer ever understood how much he was
+regarded in the light of a father by his foreign retainer. Anyway the
+relation was curiously feudal. So when Yanko asked formally for an
+interview--'and the Miss too' (he called the severe, deaf Miss Swaffer
+simply _Miss_)--it was to obtain their permission to marry.
+Swaffer heard him unmoved, dismissed him by a nod, and then shouted the
+intelligence into Miss Swaffer's best ear. She showed no surprise, and
+only remarked grimly, in a veiled blank voice, 'He certainly won't get
+any other girl to marry him.'
+
+"It is Miss Swaffer who has all the credit of the munificence: but in
+a very few days it came out that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with
+a cottage (the cottage you've seen this morning) and something like an
+acre of ground--had made it over to him in absolute property. Willcox
+expedited the deed, and I remember him telling me he had a great
+pleasure in making it ready. It recited: 'In consideration of saving the
+life of my beloved grandchild, Bertha Willcox.'
+
+"Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting
+married.
+
+"Her infatuation endured. People saw her going out to meet him in the
+evening. She stared with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where
+he was expected to appear, walking freely, with a swing from the hip,
+and humming one of the love-tunes of his country. When the boy was born,
+he got elevated at the 'Coach and Horses,' essayed again a song and a
+dance, and was again ejected. People expressed their commiseration for
+a woman married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn't care. There was a
+man now (he told me boastfully) to whom he could sing and talk in the
+language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.
+
+"But I don't know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step,
+heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems
+to me now as if the net of fate had been drawn closer round him already.
+
+"One day I met him on the footpath over the Talfourd Hill. He told me
+that 'women were funny.' I had heard already of domestic differences.
+People were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find out what
+sort of man she had married. He looked upon the sea with indifferent,
+unseeing eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day
+as he sat on the doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing
+to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some
+harm. Women are funny. And she had objected to him praying aloud in the
+evening. Why? He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him
+by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child--in
+his own country. And I discovered he longed for their boy to grow up so
+that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our
+ears sounded so disturbing, so passionate, and so bizarre. Why his wife
+should dislike the idea he couldn't tell. But that would pass, he said.
+And tilting his head knowingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate
+that she had a good heart: not hard, not fierce, open to compassion,
+charitable to the poor!
+
+"I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered whether his difference, his
+strangeness, were not penetrating with repulsion that dull nature they
+had begun by irresistibly attracting. I wondered. . . ."
+
+The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the frigid splendour of
+the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the
+hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.
+
+"Physiologically, now," he said, turning away abruptly, "it was
+possible. It was possible."
+
+He remained silent. Then went on--"At all events, the next time I saw
+him he was ill--lung trouble. He was tough, but I daresay he was not
+acclimatised as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of
+course, these mountaineers do get fits of home sickness; and a state
+of depression would make him vulnerable. He was lying half dressed on a
+couch downstairs.
+
+"A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all the middle of the
+little room. There was a wicker cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting
+steam on the hob, and some child's linen lay drying on the fender. The
+room was warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you noticed
+perhaps.
+
+"He was very feverish, and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a
+chair and looked at him fixedly across the table with her brown, blurred
+eyes. 'Why don't you have him upstairs?' I asked. With a start and a
+confused stammer she said, 'Oh! ah! I couldn't sit with him upstairs,
+Sir.'
+
+"I gave her certain directions; and going outside, I said again that
+he ought to be in bed upstairs. She wrung her hands. 'I couldn't. I
+couldn't. He keeps on saying something--I don't know what.' With the
+memory of all the talk against the man that had been dinned into her
+ears, I looked at her narrowly. I looked into her shortsighted eyes,
+at her dumb eyes that once in her life had seen an enticing shape, but
+seemed, staring at me, to see nothing at all now. But I saw she was
+uneasy.
+
+"'What's the matter with him?' she asked in a sort of vacant
+trepidation. 'He doesn't look very ill. I never did see anybody look
+like this before. . . .'
+
+"'Do you think,' I asked indignantly, 'he is shamming?'
+
+"'I can't help it, sir,' she said stolidly. And suddenly she clapped
+her hands and looked right and left. 'And there's the baby. I am
+so frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I can't
+understand what he says to it.'
+
+"'Can't you ask a neighbour to come in tonight?' I asked.
+
+"'Please, sir, nobody seems to care to come,' she muttered, dully
+resigned all at once.
+
+"I impressed upon her the necessity of the greatest care, and then had
+to go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter. 'Oh, I hope he
+won't talk!' she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.
+
+"I don't know how it is I did not see--but I didn't. And yet, turning
+in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door, very still, and as if
+meditating a flight up the miry road.
+
+"Towards the night his fever increased.
+
+"He tossed, moaned, and now and then muttered a complaint. And she sat
+with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and
+every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she
+could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker
+cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal
+instinct and that unaccountable fear.
+
+"Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he demanded a drink of water. She
+did not move. She had not understood, though he may have thought he
+was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever,
+amazed at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted impatiently,
+'Water! Give me water!'
+
+"She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child, and stood still. He
+spoke to her, and his passionate remonstrances only increased her
+fear of that strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long time,
+entreating, wondering, pleading, ordering, I suppose. She says she bore
+it as long as she could. And then a gust of rage came over him.
+
+"He sat up and called out terribly one word--some word. Then he got up
+as though he hadn't been ill at all, she says. And as in fevered dismay,
+indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round the table, she
+simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms. She heard
+him call twice after her down the road in a terrible voice--and
+fled. . . . Ah! but you should have seen stirring behind the dull,
+blurred glance of these eyes the spectre of the fear which had hunted
+her on that night three miles and a half to the door of Foster's
+cottage! I did the next day.
+
+"And it was I who found him lying face down and his body in a puddle,
+just outside the little wicket-gate.
+
+"I had been called out that night to an urgent case in the village, and
+on my way home at daybreak passed by the cottage. The door stood open.
+My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The lamp
+smoked, the fire was out, the chill of the stormy night oozed from the
+cheerless yellow paper on the wall. 'Amy!' I called aloud, and my voice
+seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had
+cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. 'Gone!' he said distinctly. 'I
+had only asked for water--only for a little water. . . .'
+
+"He was muddy. I covered him up and stood waiting in silence, catching
+a painfully gasped word now and then. They were no longer in his own
+language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. And
+with his panting breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a wild
+creature under the net; of a bird caught in a snare. She had left him.
+She had left him--sick--helpless--thirsty. The spear of the hunter had
+entered his very soul. 'Why?' he cried in the penetrating and indignant
+voice of a man calling to a responsible Maker. A gust of wind and a
+swish of rain answered.
+
+"And as I turned away to shut the door he pronounced the word
+'Merciful!' and expired.
+
+"Eventually I certified heart-failure as the immediate cause of death.
+His heart must have indeed failed him, or else he might have stood this
+night of storm and exposure, too. I closed his eyes and drove away.
+Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking sturdily between the
+dripping hedges with his collie at his heels.
+
+"'Do you know where your daughter is?' I asked.
+
+"'Don't I!' he cried. 'I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a
+poor woman like this.'
+
+"'He won't frighten her any more,' I said. 'He is dead.'
+
+"He struck with his stick at the mud.
+
+"'And there's the child.'
+
+"Then, after thinking deeply for a while--"'I don't know that it isn't
+for the best.'
+
+"That's what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of
+him. Never. Is his image as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and
+striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields? He is no
+longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love
+or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as
+a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and
+works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child
+is 'Amy Foster's boy.' She calls him Johnny--which means Little John.
+
+"It is impossible to say whether this name recalls anything to her. Does
+she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy's cot
+in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on
+his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black
+eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I
+seemed to see again the other one--the father, cast out mysteriously by
+the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMY FOSTER ***
+
+***** This file should be named 495.txt or 495.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/9/495/
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/495.zip b/old/495.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..94ad737
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/495.zip
diff --git a/old/afost10.txt b/old/afost10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2bccc8d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/afost10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1786 @@
+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad**
+#6 in our series by Joseph Conrad
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+To-morrow
+
+by Joseph Conrad
+
+April, 1996 [Etext #495]
+
+
+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad**
+*****This file should be named afost10.txt or afost10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, afost11.txt.
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, afost10a.txt.
+
+
+This etext was created by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $4
+million dollars per hour this year as we release some eight text
+files per month:  thus upping our productivity from $2 million.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is 10% of the expected number of computer users by the end
+of the year 2001.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/IBC", and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law ("IBC" is Illinois
+Benedictine College).  (Subscriptions to our paper newsletter go
+to IBC, too)
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails try our Michael S. Hart, Executive
+Director:
+hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu (internet)   hart@uiucvmd   (bitnet)
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email
+(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
+
+******
+If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
+FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
+[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
+
+ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
+login:  anonymous
+password:  your@login
+cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
+or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET INDEX?00.GUT
+for a list of books
+and
+GET NEW GUT for general information
+and
+MGET GUT* for newsletters.
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Illinois Benedictine College (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association / Illinois
+     Benedictine College" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Illinois Benedictine College".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+AMY FOSTER
+
+
+
+
+
+Kennedy is a country doctor, and lives in Cole-
+brook, on the shores of Eastbay.  The high
+ground rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the
+little town crowds the quaint High Street against
+the wall which defends it from the sea.  Beyond
+the sea-wall there curves for miles in a vast and
+regular sweep the barren beach of shingle, with the
+village of Brenzett standing out darkly across the
+water, a spire in a clump of trees; and still further
+out the perpendicular column of a lighthouse, look-
+ing in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil,
+marks the vanishing-point of the land.  The coun-
+try at the back of Brenzett is low and flat, but the
+bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and occa-
+sionally a big ship, windbound or through stress
+of weather, makes use of the anchoring ground a
+mile and a half due north from you as you stand
+at the back door of the "Ship Inn" in Brenzett.
+A dilapidated windmill near by lifting its shattered
+arms from a mound no loftier than a rubbish heap,
+and a Martello tower squatting at the water's edge
+half a mile to the south of the Coastguard cottages,
+are familiar to the skippers of small craft.  These
+are the official seamarks for the patch of trust-
+worthy bottom represented on the Admiralty charts
+by an irregular oval of dots enclosing several fig-
+ures six, with a tiny anchor engraved among them,
+and the legend "mud and shells" over all.
+
+The brow of the upland overtops the square
+tower of the Colebrook Church.  The slope is
+green and looped by a white road.  Ascending
+along this road, you open a valley broad and shal-
+low, a wide green trough of pastures and hedges
+merging inland into a vista of purple tints and
+flowing lines closing the view.
+
+In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook
+and up to Darnford, the market town fourteen
+miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy.
+He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and
+afterwards had been the companion of a famous
+traveller, in the days when there were continents
+with unexplored interiors.  His papers on the
+fauna and flora made him known to scientific socie-
+ties.  And now he had come to a country practice
+--from choice.  The penetrating power of his
+mind, acting like a corrosive fluid, had destroyed
+his ambition, I fancy.  His intelligence is of a
+scientific order, of an investigating habit, and of
+that unappeasable curiosity which believes that
+there is a particle of a general truth in every mys-
+tery.
+
+A good many years ago now, on my return from
+abroad, he invited me to stay with him.  I came
+readily enough, and as he could not neglect his
+patients to keep me company, he took me on his
+rounds--thirty miles or so of an afternoon, some-
+times.  I waited for him on the roads; the horse
+reached after the leafy twigs, and, sitting in
+the dogcart, I could hear Kennedy's laugh through
+the half-open door left open of some cottage.  He
+had a big, hearty laugh that would have fitted a
+man twice his size, a brisk manner, a bronzed face,
+and a pair of grey, profoundly attentive eyes.  He
+had the talent of making people talk to him freely,
+and an inexhaustible patience in listening to their
+tales.
+
+One day, as we trotted out of a large village into
+a shady bit of road, I saw on our left hand a low,
+black cottage, with diamond panes in the windows,
+a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and
+some roses climbing on the rickety trellis-work of
+the tiny porch.  Kennedy pulled up to a walk.  A
+woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping
+blanket over a line stretched between two old ap-
+ple-trees.  And as the bobtailed, long-necked chest-
+nut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand,
+covered by a thick dogskin glove, the doctor raised
+his voice over the hedge: "How's your child,
+Amy?"
+
+I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with
+a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been
+vigorously slapped, and to take in the squat figure,
+the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight
+knot at the back of the head.  She looked quite
+young.  With a distinct catch in her breath, her
+voice sounded low and timid.
+
+"He's well, thank you."
+
+We trotted again.  "A young patient of
+yours," I said; and the doctor, flicking the chest-
+nut absently, muttered, "Her husband used to be."
+
+"She seems a dull creature," I remarked list-
+lessly.
+
+"Precisely," said Kennedy.  "She is very pas-
+sive.  It's enough to look at the red hands hanging
+at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prom-
+inent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind
+--an inertness that one would think made it ever-
+lastingly safe from all the surprises of imagina-
+tion.  And yet which of us is safe?  At any rate,
+such as you see her, she had enough imagination
+to fall in love.  She's the daughter of one Isaac
+Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a
+shepherd; the beginning of his misfortunes dating
+from his runaway marriage with the cook of his
+widowed father--a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier,
+who passionately struck his name off his will, and
+had been heard to utter threats against his life.
+But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as
+a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the simi-
+larity of their characters.  There are other trage-
+dies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy,
+arising from irreconcilable differences and from
+that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over
+all our heads--over all our heads. . . ."
+
+The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the
+rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched
+familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near
+the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch
+the distant horizon of the sea.  The uniform
+brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy
+tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated
+out in minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted
+ploughmen.  From the edge of a copse a waggon
+with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge.
+Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed
+up against the red sun, triumphantly big, enor-
+mous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two slow-
+stepping steeds of legendary proportions.  And
+the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the head
+of the leading horse projected itself on the back-
+ground of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness.
+The end of his carter's whip quivered high up in
+the blue.  Kennedy discoursed.
+
+"She's the eldest of a large family.  At the age
+of fifteen they put her out to service at the New
+Barns Farm.  I attended Mrs. Smith, the tenant's
+wife, and saw that girl there for the first time.
+Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose,
+made her put on a black dress every afternoon.  I
+don't know what induced me to notice her at all.
+There are faces that call your attention by a cu-
+rious want of definiteness in their whole aspect, as,
+walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague
+shape which, after all, may be nothing more cu-
+rious or strange than a signpost.  The only pecu-
+liarity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in
+her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer which
+passes away with the first word.  When sharply
+spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once; but
+her heart was of the kindest.  She had never been
+heard to express a dislike for a single human being,
+and she was tender to every living creature.  She
+was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their
+dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs. Smith's grey
+parrot, its peculiarities exercised upon her a posi-
+tive fascination.  Nevertheless, when that outland-
+ish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in
+human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping
+her ears, and did not prevent the crime.  For Mrs.
+Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity;
+on the other hand, her want of charm, in view of
+Smith's well-known frivolousness, was a great rec-
+commendation.  Her short-sighted eyes would swim
+with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had
+been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet
+grass helping a toad in difficulties.  If it's true, as
+some German fellow has said, that without phos-
+phorus there is no thought, it is still more true that
+there is no kindness of heart without a certain
+amount of imagination.  She had some.  She had
+even more than is necessary to understand suffer-
+ing and to be moved by pity.  She fell in love un-
+der circumstances that leave no room for doubt in
+the matter; for you need imagination to form a
+notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover
+your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.
+
+"How this aptitude came to her, what it did
+feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery.  She was
+born in the village, and had never been further
+away from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford.
+She lived for four years with the Smiths.  New
+Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from
+the road, and she was content to look day after
+day at the same fields, hollows, rises; at the trees
+and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four men
+about the farm, always the same--day after day,
+month after month, year after year.  She never
+showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed
+to me, she did not know how to smile.  Sometimes
+of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her
+best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large grey hat
+trimmed with a black feather (I've seen her in that
+finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb
+over two stiles, tramp over three fields and along
+two hundred yards of road--never further.  There
+stood Foster's cottage.  She would help her mother
+to give their tea to the younger children, wash up
+the crockery, kiss the little ones, and go back to
+the farm.  That was all.  All the rest, all the
+change, all the relaxation.  She never seemed to
+wish for anything more.  And then she fell in love.
+She fell in love silently, obstinately--perhaps help-
+lessly.  It came slowly, but when it came it worked
+like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients
+understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse--
+a possession!  Yes, it was in her to become haunted
+and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as
+though she had been a pagan worshipper of form
+under a joyous sky--and to be awakened at last
+from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from
+that enchantment, from that transport, by a
+fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a
+brute. . . ."
+
+With the sun hanging low on its western limit,
+the expanse of the grass-lands framed in the coun-
+ter-scarps of the rising ground took on a gorgeous
+and sombre aspect.  A sense of penetrating sad-
+ness, like that inspired by a grave strain of music,
+disengaged itself from the silence of the fields.
+The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with
+downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-bur-
+dened earth had weighted their feet, bowed their
+shoulders, borne down their glances.
+
+"Yes," said the doctor to my remark, "one
+would think the earth is under a curse, since of all
+her children these that cling to her the closest are
+uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their
+very hearts were loaded with chains.  But here on
+this same road you might have seen amongst these
+heavy men a being lithe, supple, and long-limbed,
+straight like a pine with something striving up-
+wards in his appearance as though the heart with-
+in him had been buoyant.  Perhaps it was only the
+force of the contrast, but when he was passing one
+of these villagers here, the soles of his feet did not
+seem to me to touch the dust of the road.  He
+vaulted over the stiles, paced these slopes with a
+long elastic stride that made him noticeable at a
+great distance, and had lustrous black eyes.  He
+was so different from the mankind around that,
+with his freedom of movement, his soft--a little
+startled, glance, his olive complexion and graceful
+bearing, his humanity suggested to me the nature
+of a woodland creature.  He came from there."
+
+The doctor pointed with his whip, and from the
+summit of the descent seen over the rolling tops of
+the trees in a park by the side of the road, appeared
+the level sea far below us, like the floor of an im-
+mense edifice inlaid with bands of dark ripple, with
+still trails of glitter, ending in a belt of glassy
+water at the foot of the sky.  The light blur of
+smoke, from an invisible steamer, faded on the
+great clearness of the horizon like the mist of a
+breath on a mirror; and, inshore, the white sails of
+a coaster, with the appearance of disentangling
+themselves slowly from under the branches, floated
+clear of the foliage of the trees.
+
+"Shipwrecked in the bay?" I said.
+
+"Yes; he was a castaway.  A poor emigrant
+from Central Europe bound to America and washed
+ashore here in a storm.  And for him, who knew
+nothing of the earth, England was an undiscovered
+country.  It was some time before he learned its
+name; and for all I know he might have expected
+to find wild beasts or wild men here, when, crawling
+in the dark over the sea-wall, he rolled down the
+other side into a dyke, where it was another miracle
+he didn't get drowned.  But he struggled instinc-
+tively like an animal under a net, and this blind
+struggle threw him out into a field.  He must have
+been, indeed, of a tougher fibre than he looked to
+withstand without expiring such buffetings, the
+violence of his exertions, and so much fear.  Later
+on, in his broken English that resembled curiously
+the speech of a young child, he told me himself that
+he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer
+in this world.  And truly--he would add--how was
+he to know?  He fought his way against the rain
+and the gale on all fours, and crawled at last
+among some sheep huddled close under the lee of a
+hedge.  They ran off in all directions, bleating in
+the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar
+sound he heard on these shores.  It must have been
+two in the morning then.  And this is all we know
+of the manner of his landing, though he did not
+arrive unattended by any means.  Only his grisly
+company did not begin to come ashore till much
+later in the day. . . ."
+
+The doctor gathered the reins, clicked his
+tongue; we trotted down the hill.  Then turning,
+almost directly, a sharp corner into the High
+Street, we rattled over the stones and were home.
+
+Late in the evening Kennedy, breaking a spell
+of moodiness that had come over him, returned to
+the story.  Smoking his pipe, he paced the long
+room from end to end.  A reading-lamp concen-
+trated all its light upon the papers on his desk;
+and, sitting by the open window, I saw, after the
+windless, scorching day, the frigid splendour of a
+hazy sea lying motionless under the moon.  Not a
+whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not
+a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth be-
+low--never a sign of life but the scent of climbing
+jasmine; and Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me,
+passed through the wide casement, to vanish out-
+side in a chill and sumptuous stillness.
+
+". . .  The relations of shipwrecks in the
+olden time tell us of much suffering.  Often the
+castaways were only saved from drowning to die
+miserably from starvation on a barren coast; oth-
+ers suffered violent death or else slavery, passing
+through years of precarious existence with people
+to whom their strangeness was an object of suspi-
+cion, dislike or fear.  We read about these things,
+and they are very pitiful.  It is indeed hard upon
+a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless,
+incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in
+some obscure corner of the earth.  Yet amongst all
+the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of
+the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever
+had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I
+am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers
+cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay, almost
+within sight from this very window.
+
+"He did not know the name of his ship.  Indeed,
+in the course of time we discovered he did not even
+know that ships had names--'like Christian peo-
+ple'; and when, one day, from the top of the Tal-
+fourd Hill, he beheld the sea lying open to his view,
+his eyes roamed afar, lost in an air of wild surprise,
+as though he had never seen such a sight before.
+And probably he had not.  As far as I could make
+out, he had been hustled together with many others
+on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth of
+the Elbe, too bewildered to take note of his sur-
+roundings, too weary to see anything, too anxious
+to care.  They were driven below into the 'tween-
+deck and battened down from the very start.  It
+was a low timber dwelling--he would say--with
+wooden beams overhead, like the houses in his coun-
+try, but you went into it down a ladder.  It was
+very large, very cold, damp and sombre, with places
+in the manner of wooden boxes where people had to
+sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking all
+ways at once all the time.  He crept into one of
+these boxes and laid down there in the clothes in
+which he had left his home many days before, keep-
+ing his bundle and his stick by his side.  People
+groaned, children cried, water dripped, the lights
+went out, the walls of the place creaked, and every-
+thing was being shaken so that in one's little box
+one dared not lift one's head.  He had lost touch
+with his only companion (a young man from the
+same valley, he said), and all the time a great noise
+of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell--
+boom! boom!  An awful sickness overcame him,
+even to the point of making him neglect his pray-
+ers.  Besides, one could not tell whether it was
+morning or evening.  It seemed always to be night
+in that place.
+
+"Before that he had been travelling a long, long
+time on the iron track.  He looked out of the win-
+dow, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it, and
+the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads
+seemed to fly round and round about him till his
+head swam.  He gave me to understand that he had
+on his passage beheld uncounted multitudes of peo-
+ple--whole nations--all dressed in such clothes as
+the rich wear.  Once he was made to get out of the
+carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in
+a house of bricks with his bundle under his head;
+and once for many hours he had to sit on a floor of
+flat stones dozing, with his knees up and with his
+bundle between his feet.  There was a roof over him,
+which seemed made of glass, and was so high that
+the tallest mountain-pine he had ever seen would
+have had room to grow under it.  Steam-machines
+rolled in at one end and out at the other.  People
+swarmed more than you can see on a feast-day
+round the miraculous Holy Image in the yard of
+the Carmelite Convent down in the plains where,
+before he left his home, he drove his mother in a
+wooden cart--a pious old woman who wanted to
+offer prayers and make a vow for his safety.  He
+could not give me an idea of how large and lofty
+and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and clang
+of iron, the place was, but some one had told him
+it was called Berlin.  Then they rang a bell, and
+another steam-machine came in, and again he was
+taken on and on through a land that wearied his
+eyes by its flatness without a single bit of a hill to
+be seen anywhere.  One more night he spent shut
+up in a building like a good stable with a litter of
+straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a
+lot of men, of whom not one could understand a
+single word he said.  In the morning they were all
+led down to the stony shores of an extremely broad
+muddy river, flowing not between hills but between
+houses that seemed immense.  There was a steam-
+machine that went on the water, and they all stood
+upon it packed tight, only now there were with
+them many women and children who made much
+noise.  A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face;
+he was wet through, and his teeth chattered.  He
+and the young man from the same valley took each
+other by the hand.
+
+"They thought they were being taken to Amer-
+ica straight away, but suddenly the steam-machine
+bumped against the side of a thing like a house on
+the water.  The walls were smooth and black, and
+there uprose, growing from the roof as it were,
+bare trees in the shape of crosses, extremely high.
+That's how it appeared to him then, for he had
+never seen a ship before.  This was the ship that
+was going to swim all the way to America.  Voices
+shouted, everything swayed; there was a ladder
+dipping up and down.  He went up on his hands
+and knees in mortal fear of falling into the water
+below, which made a great splashing.  He got sep-
+arated from his companion, and when he descended
+into the bottom of that ship his heart seemed to melt
+suddenly within him.
+
+"It was then also, as he told me, that he lost con-
+tact for good and all with one of those three men
+who the summer before had been going about
+through all the little towns in the foothills of his
+country.  They would arrive on market days driv-
+ing in a peasant's cart, and would set up an office
+in an inn or some other Jew's house.  There were
+three of them, of whom one with a long beard
+looked venerable; and they had red cloth collars
+round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves
+like Government officials.  They sat proudly behind
+a long table; and in the next room, so that the com-
+mon people shouldn't hear, they kept a cunning
+telegraph machine, through which they could talk
+to the Emperor of America.  The fathers hung
+about the door, but the young men of the mountains
+would crowd up to the table asking many questions,
+for there was work to be got all the year round at
+three dollars a day in America, and no military
+service to do.
+
+"But the American Kaiser would not take every-
+body.  Oh, no!  He himself had a great difficulty
+in getting accepted, and the venerable man in uni-
+form had to go out of the room several times to
+work the telegraph on his behalf.  The American
+Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, he
+being young and strong.  However, many able
+young men backed out, afraid of the great dis-
+tance; besides, those only who had some money
+could be taken.  There were some who sold their
+huts and their land because it cost a lot of money
+to get to America; but then, once there, you had
+three dollars a day, and if you were clever you
+could find places where true gold could be picked
+up on the ground.  His father's house was getting
+over full.  Two of his brothers were married and
+had children.  He promised to send money home
+from America by post twice a year.  His father
+sold an old cow, a pair of piebald mountain ponies
+of his own raising, and a cleared plot of fair pas-
+ture land on the sunny slope of a pine-clad pass to
+a Jew inn-keeper in order to pay the people of the
+ship that took men to America to get rich in a
+short time.
+
+"He must have been a real adventurer at heart,
+for how many of the greatest enterprises in the
+conquest of the earth had for their beginning just
+such a bargaining away of the paternal cow for the
+mirage or true gold far away!  I have been telling
+you more or less in my own words what I learned
+fragmentarily in the course of two or three years,
+during which I seldom missed an opportunity of a
+friendly chat with him.  He told me this story of
+his adventure with many flashes of white teeth and
+lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of anx-
+ious baby-talk, then, as he acquired the language,
+with great fluency, but always with that singing,
+soft, and at the same time vibrating intonation that
+instilled a strangely penetrating power into the
+sound of the most familiar English words, as if
+they had been the words of an unearthly language.
+And he always would come to an end, with many
+emphatic shakes of his head, upon that awful sen-
+sation of his heart melting within him directly he
+set foot on board that ship.  Afterwards there
+seemed to come for him a period of blank ignorance,
+at any rate as to facts.  No doubt he must have
+been abominably sea-sick and abominably unhappy
+--this soft and passionate adventurer, taken thus
+out of his knowledge, and feeling bitterly as he lay
+in his emigrant bunk his utter loneliness; for his
+was a highly sensitive nature.  The next thing we
+know of him for certain is that he had been hiding
+in Hammond's pig-pound by the side of the road
+to Norton six miles, as the crow flies, from the sea.
+Of these experiences he was unwilling to speak:
+they seemed to have seared into his soul a sombre
+sort of wonder and indignation.  Through the ru-
+mours of the country-side, which lasted for a good
+many days after his arrival, we know that the fish-
+ermen of West Colebrook had been disturbed and
+startled by heavy knocks against the walls of
+weatherboard cottages, and by a voice crying
+piercingly strange words in the night.  Several of
+them turned out even, but, no doubt, he had fled in
+sudden alarm at their rough angry tones hailing
+each other in the darkness.  A sort of frenzy must
+have helped him up the steep Norton hill.  It was
+he, no doubt, who early the following morning had
+been seen lying (in a swoon, I should say) on the
+roadside grass by the Brenzett carrier, who actually
+got down to have a nearer look, but drew back, in-
+timidated by the perfect immobility, and by some-
+thing queer in the aspect of that tramp, sleeping
+so still under the showers.  As the day advanced,
+some children came dashing into school at Norton
+in such a fright that the schoolmistress went out
+and spoke indignantly to a 'horrid-looking man'
+on the road.  He edged away, hanging his head,
+for a few steps, and then suddenly ran off with ex-
+traordinary fleetness.  The driver of Mr. Brad-
+ley's milk-cart made no secret of it that he had
+lashed with his whip at a hairy sort of gipsy fel-
+low who, jumping up at a turn of the road by the
+Vents, made a snatch at the pony's bridle.  And
+he caught him a good one too, right over the face,
+he said, that made him drop down in the mud a
+jolly sight quicker than he had jumped up; but it
+was a good half-a-mile before he could stop the
+pony.  Maybe that in his desperate endeavours to
+get help, and in his need to get in touch with some
+one, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart.  Also
+three boys confessed afterwards to throwing stones
+at a funny tramp, knocking about all wet and
+muddy, and, it seemed, very drunk, in the narrow
+deep lane by the limekilns.  All this was the talk of
+three villages for days; but we have Mrs. Finn's
+(the wife of Smith's waggoner) unimpeachable
+testimony that she saw him get over the low wall of
+Hammond's pig-pound and lurch straight at her,
+babbling aloud in a voice that was enough to make
+one die of fright.  Having the baby with her in a
+perambulator, Mrs. Finn called out to him to go
+away, and as he persisted in coming nearer, she hit
+him courageously with her umbrella over the head
+and, without once looking back, ran like the wind
+with the perambulator as far as the first house in
+the village.  She stopped then, out of breath, and
+spoke to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of
+stones; and the old chap, taking off his immense
+black wire goggles, got up on his shaky legs to
+look where she pointed.  Together they followed
+with their eyes the figure of the man running over
+a field; they saw him fall down, pick himself up,
+and run on again, staggering and waving his long
+arms above his head, in the direction of the New
+Barns Farm.  From that moment he is plainly in
+the toils of his obscure and touching destiny.
+There is no doubt after this of what happened to
+him.  All is certain now: Mrs. Smith's intense ter-
+ror; Amy Foster's stolid conviction held against
+the other's nervous attack, that the man 'meant no
+harm'; Smith's exasperation (on his return from
+Darnford Market) at finding the dog barking
+himself into a fit, the back-door locked, his wife in
+hysterics; and all for an unfortunate dirty tramp,
+supposed to be even then lurking in his stackyard.
+Was he?  He would teach him to frighten women.
+
+"Smith is notoriously hot-tempered, but the
+sight of some nondescript and miry creature sitting
+crosslegged amongst a lot of loose straw, and
+swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage,
+made him pause.  Then this tramp stood up si-
+lently before him, one mass of mud and filth from
+head to foot.  Smith, alone amongst his stacks with
+this apparition, in the stormy twilight ringing with
+the infuriated barking of the dog, felt the dread
+of an inexplicable strangeness.  But when that be-
+ing, parting with his black hands the long matted
+locks that hung before his face, as you part the two
+halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glisten-
+ing, wild, black-and-white eyes, the weirdness of
+this silent encounter fairly staggered him.  He had
+admitted since (for the story has been a legitimate
+subject of conversation about here for years) that
+he made more than one step backwards.  Then a
+sudden burst of rapid, senseless speech persuaded
+him at once that he had to do with an escaped luna-
+tic.  In fact, that impression never wore off com-
+pletely.  Smith has not in his heart given up his
+secret conviction of the man's essential insanity to
+this very day.
+
+"As the creature approached him, jabbering in
+a most discomposing manner, Smith (unaware that
+he was being addressed as 'gracious lord,' and ad-
+jured in God's name to afford food and shelter)
+kept on speaking firmly but gently to it, and re-
+treating all the time into the other yard.  At last,
+watching his chance, by a sudden charge he bun-
+dled him headlong into the wood-lodge, and in-
+stantly shot the bolt.  Thereupon he wiped his
+brow, though the day was cold.  He had done his
+duty to the community by shutting up a wander-
+ing and probably dangerous maniac.  Smith isn't
+a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only
+for that one idea of lunacy.  He was not imagina-
+tive enough to ask himself whether the man might
+not be perishing with cold and hunger.  Meantime,
+at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in
+the lodge.  Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs,
+where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but
+Amy Foster sobbed piteously at the kitchen door,
+wringing her hands and muttering, 'Don't!
+don't!'  I daresay Smith had a rough time of it
+that evening with one noise and another, and this
+insane, disturbing voice crying obstinately through
+the door only added to his irritation.  He couldn't
+possibly have connected this troublesome lunatic
+with the sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which
+there had been a rumour in the Darnford market-
+place.  And I daresay the man inside had been very
+near to insanity on that night.  Before his excite-
+ment collapsed and he became unconscious he was
+throwing himself violently about in the dark, roll-
+ing on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with
+rage, cold, hunger, amazement, and despair.
+
+"He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of
+the Carpathians, and the vessel sunk the night be-
+fore in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship
+<i>Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea</i>, of appalling mem-
+ory.
+
+"A few months later we could read in the papers
+the accounts of the bogus 'Emigration Agencies'
+among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more re-
+mote provinces of Austria.  The object of these
+scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant
+people's homesteads, and they were in league with
+the local usurers.  They exported their victims
+through Hamburg mostly.  As to the ship, I had
+watched her out of this very window, reaching
+close-hauled under short canvas into the bay on a
+dark, threatening afternoon.  She came to an an-
+chor, correctly by the chart, off the Brenzett Coast-
+guard station.  I remember before the night fell
+looking out again at the outlines of her spars and
+rigging that stood out dark and pointed on a back-
+ground of ragged, slaty clouds like another and a
+slighter spire to the left of the Brenzett church-
+tower.  In the evening the wind rose.  At midnight
+I could hear in my bed the terrific gusts and the
+sounds of a driving deluge.
+
+"About that time the Coastguardmen thought
+they saw the lights of a steamer over the anchoring-
+ground.  In a moment they vanished; but it is clear
+that another vessel of some sort had tried for shel-
+ter in the bay on that awful, blind night, had
+rammed the German ship amidships (a breach--
+as one of the divers told me afterwards--'that you
+could sail a Thames barge through'), and then
+had gone out either scathless or damaged, who shall
+say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal,
+to perish mysteriously at sea.  Of her nothing ever
+came to light, and yet the hue and cry that was
+raised all over the world would have found her out
+if she had been in existence anywhere on the face
+of the waters.
+
+"A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy
+silence as of a neatly executed crime, characterise
+this murderous disaster, which, as you may remem-
+ber, had its gruesome celebrity.  The wind would
+have prevented the loudest outcries from reaching
+the shore; there had been evidently no time for sig-
+nals of distress.  It was death without any sort of
+fuss.  The Hamburg ship, filling all at once, cap-
+sized as she sank, and at daylight there was not
+even the end of a spar to be seen above water.  She
+was missed, of course, and at first the Coastguard-
+men surmised that she had either dragged her an-
+chor or parted her cable some time during the
+night, and had been blown out to sea.  Then, after
+the tide turned, the wreck must have shifted a little
+and released some of the bodies, because a child
+--a little fair-haired child in a red frock--
+came ashore abreast of the Martello tower.  By
+the afternoon you could see along three miles of
+beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in
+and out of the tumbling foam, and rough-look-
+ing men, women with hard faces, children, mostly
+fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping,
+on stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long
+procession past the door of the 'Ship Inn,' to be
+laid out in a row under the north wall of the
+Brenzett Church.
+
+"Officially, the body of the little girl in the red
+frock is the first thing that came ashore from that
+ship.  But I have patients amongst the seafaring
+population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I
+am informed that very early that morning two
+brothers, who went down to look after their cobble
+hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from
+Brenzett, an ordinary ship's hencoop lying high
+and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks
+inside.  Their families ate the birds, and the hen-
+coop was split into firewood with a hatchet.  It is
+possible that a man (supposing he happened to be
+on deck at the time of the accident) might have
+floated ashore on that hencoop.  He might.  I ad-
+mit it is improbable, but there was the man--and
+for days, nay, for weeks--it didn't enter our heads
+that we had amongst us the only living soul that
+had escaped from that disaster.  The man himself,
+even when he learned to speak intelligibly, could
+tell us very little.  He remembered he had felt bet-
+ter (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and
+that the darkness, the wind, and the rain took his
+breath away.  This looks as if he had been on deck
+some time during that night.  But we mustn't forget
+he had been taken out of his knowledge, that he
+had been sea-sick and battened down below for four
+days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of
+the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea
+of what was happening to him.  The rain, the
+wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the
+bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain
+of his wretchedness and misery, his heartbroken as-
+tonishment that it was neither seen nor understood,
+his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the
+women fierce.  He had approached them as a beg-
+gar, it is true, he said; but in his country, even if
+they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars.
+The children in his country were not taught to
+throw stones at those who asked for compassion.
+Smith's strategy overcame him completely.  The
+wood-lodge presented the horrible aspect of a dun-
+geon.  What would be done to him next? . . .
+No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes
+with the aureole of an angel of light.  The girl
+had not been able to sleep for thinking of the poor
+man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were
+up, she slipped out across the back yard.  Holding
+the door of the wood-lodge ajar, she looked in and
+extended to him half a loaf of white bread--'such
+bread as the rich eat in my country,' he used to
+say.
+
+"At this he got up slowly from amongst all sorts
+of rubbish, stiff, hungry, trembling, miserable, and
+doubtful.  'Can you eat this?' she asked in her
+soft and timid voice.  He must have taken her for
+a 'gracious lady.'  He devoured ferociously, and
+tears were falling on the crust.  Suddenly he
+dropped the bread, seized her wrist, and im-
+printed a kiss on her hand.  She was not fright-
+ened.  Through his forlorn condition she had
+observed that he was good-looking.  She shut
+the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen.
+Much later on, she told Mrs. Smith, who shud-
+dered at the bare idea of being touched by that
+creature.
+
+"Through this act of impulsive pity he was
+brought back again within the pale of human rela-
+tions with his new surroundings.  He never forgot
+it--never.
+
+"That very same morning old Mr. Swaffer
+(Smith's nearest neighbour) came over to give his
+advice, and ended by carrying him off.  He stood,
+unsteady on his legs, meek, and caked over in half-
+dried mud, while the two men talked around him in
+an incomprehensible tongue.  Mrs. Smith had re-
+fused to come downstairs till the madman was off
+the premises; Amy Foster, far from within the dark
+kitchen, watched through the open back door; and
+he obeyed the signs that were made to him to the
+best of his ability.  But Smith was full of mistrust.
+'Mind, sir!  It may be all his cunning,' he cried
+repeatedly in a tone of warning.  When Mr.
+Swaffer started the mare, the deplorable being sit-
+ting humbly by his side, through weakness, nearly
+fell out over the back of the high two-wheeled cart.
+Swaffer took him straight home.  And it is then
+that I come upon the scene.
+
+"I was called in by the simple process of the old
+man beckoning to me with his forefinger over the
+gate of his house as I happened to be driving past.
+I got down, of course.
+
+"'I've got something here,' he mumbled, lead-
+ing the way to an outhouse at a little distance from
+his other farm-buildings.
+
+"It was there that I saw him first, in a long low
+room taken upon the space of that sort of coach-
+house.  It was bare and whitewashed, with a small
+square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty
+pane at its further end.  He was lying on his back
+upon a straw pallet; they had given him a couple
+of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the
+remainder of his strength in the exertion of clean-
+ing himself.  He was almost speechless; his quick
+breathing under the blankets pulled up to his chin,
+his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a
+wild bird caught in a snare.  While I was examining
+him, old Swaffer stood silently by the door, passing
+the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper lip.
+I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of
+medicine, and naturally made some inquiries.
+
+"'Smith caught him in the stackyard at New
+Barns,' said the old chap in his deliberate, unmoved
+manner, and as if the other had been indeed a sort
+of wild animal.  'That's how I came by him.
+Quite a curiosity, isn't he?  Now tell me, doctor--
+you've been all over the world--don't you think
+that's a bit of a Hindoo we've got hold of here.'
+
+"I was greatly surprised.  His long black hair
+scattered over the straw bolster contrasted with the
+olive pallor of his face.  It occurred to me he might
+be a Basque.  It didn't necessarily follow that he
+should understand Spanish; but I tried him with
+the few words I know, and also with some French.
+The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear
+to his lips puzzled me utterly.  That afternoon the
+young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read
+Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had strug-
+gled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss
+Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him
+from the doorway.  They retreated, just the least
+bit scared by the flood of passionate speech which,
+turning on his pallet, he let out at them.  They ad-
+mitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical--
+but, in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was
+startling--so excitable, so utterly unlike anything
+one had ever heard.  The village boys climbed up
+the bank to have a peep through the little square
+aperture.  Everybody was wondering what Mr.
+Swaffer would do with him.
+
+"He simply kept him.
+
+"Swaffer would be called eccentric were he not
+so much respected.  They will tell you that Mr.
+Swaffer sits up as late as ten o'clock at night to
+read books, and they will tell you also that he can
+write a cheque for two hundred pounds without
+thinking twice about it.  He himself would tell
+you that the Swaffers had owned land between
+this and Darnford for these three hundred years.
+He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does not look
+a bit older than when I first came here.  He is a
+great breeder of sheep, and deals extensively in cat-
+tle.  He attends market days for miles around in
+every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low
+over the reins, his lank grey hair curling over the
+collar of his warm coat, and with a green plaid rug
+round his legs.  The calmness of advanced age
+gives a solemnity to his manner.  He is clean-
+shaved; his lips are thin and sensitive; something
+rigid and monarchal in the set of his features lends
+a certain elevation to the character of his face.  He
+has been known to drive miles in the rain to see a
+new kind of rose in somebody's garden, or a mon-
+strous cabbage grown by a cottager.  He loves to
+hear tell of or to be shown something that he calls
+'outlandish.'  Perhaps it was just that outlandish-
+ness of the man which influenced old Swaffer.  Per-
+haps it was only an inexplicable caprice.  All I
+know is that at the end of three weeks I caught
+sight of Smith's lunatic digging in Swaffer's kitch-
+en garden.  They had found out he could use a
+spade.  He dug barefooted.
+
+"His black hair flowed over his shoulders.  I
+suppose it was Swaffer who had given him the
+striped old cotton shirt; but he wore still the na-
+tional brown cloth trousers (in which he had been
+washed ashore) fitting to the leg almost like
+tights; was belted with a broad leathern belt stud-
+ded with little brass discs; and had never yet ven-
+tured into the village.  The land he looked upon
+seemed to him kept neatly, like the grounds round
+a landowner's house; the size of the cart-horses
+struck him with astonishment; the roads resembled
+garden walks, and the aspect of the people, espe-
+cially on Sundays, spoke of opulence.  He won-
+dered what made them so hardhearted and their
+children so bold.  He got his food at the back door,
+carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse,
+and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign
+of the cross before he began.  Beside the same pal-
+let, kneeling in the early darkness of the short days,
+he recited aloud the Lord's Prayer before he slept.
+Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow with
+veneration from the waist, and stand erect while
+the old man, with his fingers over his upper lip, sur-
+veyed him silently.  He bowed also to Miss Swaffer,
+who kept house frugally for her father--a broad-
+shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five, with
+the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey,
+steady eye.  She was Church--as people said
+(while her father was one of the trustees of the
+Baptist Chapel)--and wore a little steel cross at
+her waist.  She dressed severely in black, in mem-
+ory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the
+neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged
+some twenty-five years ago--a young farmer who
+broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wed-
+ding day.  She had the unmoved countenance of
+the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like
+her father's, astonished one sometimes by a myste-
+riously ironic curl.
+
+"These were the people to whom he owed alle-
+giance, and an overwhelming loneliness seemed to
+fall from the leaden sky of that winter without sun-
+shine.  All the faces were sad.  He could talk to
+no one, and had no hope of ever understanding
+anybody.  It was as if these had been the faces of
+people from the other world--dead people--he
+used to tell me years afterwards.  Upon my word,
+I wonder he did not go mad.  He didn't know
+where he was.  Somewhere very far from his moun-
+tains--somewhere over the water.  Was this Amer-
+ica, he wondered?
+
+"If it hadn't been for the steel cross at Miss
+Swaffer's belt he would not, he confessed, have
+known whether he was in a Christian country at
+all.  He used to cast stealthy glances at it, and feel
+comforted.  There was nothing here the same as in
+his country!  The earth and the water were differ-
+ent; there were no images of the Redeemer by the
+roadside.  The very grass was different, and the
+trees.  All the trees but the three old Norway pines
+on the bit of lawn before Swaffer's house, and
+these reminded him of his country.  He had been
+detected once, after dusk, with his forehead against
+the trunk of one of them, sobbing, and talking to
+himself.  They had been like brothers to him at that
+time, he affirmed.  Everything else was strange.
+Conceive you the kind of an existence overshad-
+owed, oppressed, by the everyday material appear-
+ances, as if by the visions of a nightmare.  At
+night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking
+of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he
+had eaten in this foreign land.  She had been
+neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened.  Her face
+he remembered as the only comprehensible face
+amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mys-
+terious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who
+are possessed of a knowledge beyond the compre-
+hension of the living.  I wonder whether the mem-
+ory of her compassion prevented him from cutting
+his throat.  But there!  I suppose I am an old sen-
+timentalist, and forget the instinctive love of life
+which it takes all the strength of an uncommon de-
+spair to overcome.
+
+"He did the work which was given him with an
+intelligence which surprised old Swaffer.  By-and-
+by it was discovered that he could help at the
+ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the bullocks
+in the cattle-yard, and was of some use with the
+sheep.  He began to pick up words, too, very fast;
+and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he res-
+cued from an untimely death a grand-child of old
+Swaffer.
+
+"Swaffer's younger daughter is married to
+Willcox, a solicitor and the Town Clerk of Cole-
+brook.  Regularly twice a year they come to stay
+with the old man for a few days.  Their only child,
+a little girl not three years old at the time, ran out
+of the house alone in her little white pinafore, and,
+toddling across the grass of a terraced garden,
+pitched herself over a low wall head first into the
+horsepond in the yard below.
+
+"Our man was out with the waggoner and the
+plough in the field nearest to the house, and as he
+was leading the team round to begin a fresh fur-
+row, he saw, through the gap of the gate, what for
+anybody else would have been a mere flutter of
+something white.  But he had straight-glancing,
+quick, far-reaching eyes, that only seemed to flinch
+and lose their amazing power before the immensity
+of the sea.  He was barefooted, and looking as out-
+landish as the heart of Swaffer could desire.  Leav-
+ing the horses on the turn, to the inexpressible dis-
+ust of the waggoner he bounded off, going over
+the ploughed ground in long leaps, and suddenly
+appeared before the mother, thrust the child into
+her arms, and strode away.
+
+"The pond was not very deep; but still, if he
+had not had such good eyes, the child would have
+perished--miserably suffocated in the foot or so of
+sticky mud at the bottom.  Old Swaffer walked out
+slowly into the field, waited till the plough came
+over to his side, had a good look at him, and with-
+out saying a word went back to the house.  But
+from that time they laid out his meals on the kitch-
+en table; and at first, Miss Swaffer, all in black and
+with an inscrutable face, would come and stand in
+the doorway of the living-room to see him make a
+big sign of the cross before he fell to.  I believe that
+from that day, too, Swaffer began to pay him reg-
+ular wages.
+
+"I can't follow step by step his development.
+He cut his hair short, was seen in the village and
+along the road going to and fro to his work like
+any other man.  Children ceased to shout after him.
+He became aware of social differences, but re-
+mained for a long time surprised at the bare pov-
+erty of the churches among so much wealth.  He
+couldn't understand either why they were kept shut
+up on week days.  There was nothing to steal in
+them.  Was it to keep people from praying too
+often?  The rectory took much notice of him about
+that time, and I believe the young ladies attempted
+to prepare the ground for his conversion.  They
+could not, however, break him of his habit of cross-
+ing himself, but he went so far as to take off the
+string with a couple of brass medals the size of a
+sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of
+scapulary which he wore round his neck.  He hung
+them on the wall by the side of his bed, and he was
+still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord's
+Prayer, in incomprehensible words and in a slow,
+fervent tone, as he had heard his old father do at
+the head of all the kneeling family, big and little,
+on every evening of his life.  And though he wore
+corduroys at work, and a slop-made pepper-and-
+salt suit on Sundays, strangers would turn round
+to look after him on the road.  His foreignness had
+a peculiar and indelible stamp.  At last people be-
+came used to see him.  But they never became used
+to him.  His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy
+complexion; his hat cocked on the left ear; his hab-
+it, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one
+shoulder, like a hussar's dolman; his manner of
+leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agility, but
+in the ordinary course of progression--all these
+peculiarities were, as one may say, so many causes
+of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the vil-
+lage.  <i>They</i> wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat
+on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky.
+Neither did they go about the fields screaming dis-
+mal tunes.  Many times have I heard his high-
+pitched voice from behind the ridge of some slop-
+ing sheep-walk, a voice light and soaring, like a
+lark's, but with a melancholy human note, over our
+fields that hear only the song of birds.  And I
+should be startled myself.  Ah!  He was different:
+innocent of heart, and full of good will, which no-
+body wanted, this castaway, that, like a man trans-
+planted into another planet, was separated by an
+immense space from his past and by an immense
+ignorance from his future.  His quick, fervent ut-
+terance positively shocked everybody.  'An excit-
+able devil,' they called him.  One evening, in the
+tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having drunk
+some whisky), he upset them all by singing a love
+song of his country.  They hooted him down, and
+he was pained; but Preble, the lame wheelwright,
+and Vincent, the fat blacksmith, and the other nota-
+bles too, wanted to drink their evening beer in
+peace.  On another occasion he tried to show them
+how to dance.  The dust rose in clouds from the
+sanded floor; he leaped straight up amongst the
+deal tables, struck his heels together, squatted on
+one heel in front of old Preble, shooting out the
+other leg, uttered wild and exulting cries, jumped up
+to whirl on one foot, snapping his fingers above his
+head--and a strange carter who was having a drink
+in there began to swear, and cleared out with his
+half-pint in his hand into the bar.  But when sud-
+denly he sprang upon a table and continued to
+dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered.
+He didn't want any 'acrobat tricks in the tap-
+room.'  They laid their hands on him.  Having
+had a glass or two, Mr. Swaffer's foreigner tried
+to expostulate: was ejected forcibly: got a black
+eye.
+
+"I believe he felt the hostility of his human sur-
+roundings.  But he was tough--tough in spirit,
+too, as well as in body.  Only the memory of the
+sea frightened him, with that vague terror that is
+left by a bad dream.  His home was far away; and
+he did not want now to go to America.  I had often
+explained to him that there is no place on earth
+where true gold can be found lying ready and to be
+got for the trouble of the picking up.  How then,
+he asked, could he ever return home with empty
+hands when there had been sold a cow, two ponies,
+and a bit of land to pay for his going?  His eyes
+would fill with tears, and, averting them from the
+immense shimmer of the sea, he would throw him-
+self face down on the grass.  But sometimes, cock-
+ing his hat with a little conquering air, he would
+defy my wisdom.  He had found his bit of true
+gold.  That was Amy Foster's heart; which was 'a
+golden heart, and soft to people's misery,' he
+would say in the accents of overwhelming convic-
+tion.
+
+"He was called Yanko.  He had explained that
+this meant little John; but as he would also repeat
+very often that he was a mountaineer (some word
+sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall)
+he got it for his surname.  And this is the only
+trace of him that the succeeding ages may find in
+the marriage register of the parish.  There it
+stands--Yanko Goorall--in the rector's handwrit-
+ing.  The crooked cross made by the castaway, a
+cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the
+most solemn part of the whole ceremony, is all that
+remains now to perpetuate the memory of his name.
+
+"His courtship had lasted some time--ever since
+he got his precarious footing in the community.  It
+began by his buying for Amy Foster a green satin
+ribbon in Darnford.  This was what you did in his
+country.  You bought a ribbon at a Jew's stall on
+a fair-day.  I don't suppose the girl knew what to
+do with it, but he seemed to think that his honoura-
+ble intentions could not be mistaken.
+
+"It was only when he declared his purpose to
+get married that I fully understood how, for a hun-
+dred futile and inappreciable reasons, how--shall
+I say odious?--he was to all the countryside.
+Every old woman in the village was up in arms.
+Smith, coming upon him near the farm, promised
+to break his head for him if he found him about
+again.  But he twisted his little black moustache
+with such a bellicose air and rolled such big, black
+fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to noth-
+ing.  Smith, however, told the girl that she must
+be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong
+in his head.  All the same, when she heard him in
+the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a
+couple of bars of a weird and mournful tune, she
+would drop whatever she had in her hand--she
+would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence
+--and she would run out to his call.  Mrs. Smith
+called her a shameless hussy.  She answered noth-
+ing.  She said nothing at all to anybody, and went
+on her way as if she had been deaf.  She and I alone
+all in the land, I fancy, could see his very real
+beauty.  He was very good-looking, and most
+graceful in his bearing, with that something wild
+as of a woodland creature in his aspect.  Her moth-
+er moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came
+to see her on her day out.  The father was surly,
+but pretended not to know; and Mrs. Finn once
+told her plainly that 'this man, my dear, will do
+you some harm some day yet.'  And so it went on.
+They could be seen on the roads, she tramping stol-
+idly in her finery--grey dress, black feather, stout
+boots, prominent white cotton gloves that caught
+your eye a hundred yards away; and he, his coat
+slung picturesquely over one shoulder, pacing by
+her side, gallant of bearing and casting tender
+glances upon the girl with the golden heart.  I
+wonder whether he saw how plain she was.  Perhaps
+among types so different from what he had ever
+seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps
+he was seduced by the divine quality of her
+pity.
+
+"Yanko was in great trouble meantime.  In his
+country you get an old man for an ambassador in
+marriage affairs.  He did not know how to pro-
+ceed.  However, one day in the midst of sheep in a
+field (he was now Swaffer's under-shepherd with
+Foster) he took off his hat to the father and de-
+clared himself humbly.  'I daresay she's fool
+enough to marry you,' was all Foster said.  'And
+then,' he used to relate, 'he puts his hat on his head,
+looks black at me as if he wanted to cut my throat,
+whistles the dog, and off he goes, leaving me to do
+the work.'  The Fosters, of course, didn't like to
+lose the wages the girl earned: Amy used to give all
+her money to her mother.  But there was in Foster
+a very genuine aversion to that match.  He con-
+tended that the fellow was very good with sheep,
+but was not fit for any girl to marry.  For one
+thing, he used to go along the hedges muttering to
+himself like a dam' fool; and then, these foreign-
+ers behave very queerly to women sometimes.  And
+perhaps he would want to carry her off somewhere
+--or run off himself.  It was not safe.  He
+preached it to his daughter that the fellow might
+ill-use her in some way.  She made no answer.  It
+was, they said in the village, as if the man had done
+something to her.  People discussed the matter.  It
+was quite an excitement, and the two went on
+'walking out' together in the face of opposition.
+Then something unexpected happened.
+
+"I don't know whether old Swaffer ever under-
+stood how much he was regarded in the light of a
+father by his foreign retainer.  Anyway the rela-
+tion was curiously feudal.  So when Yanko asked
+formally for an interview--'and the Miss too' (he
+called the severe, deaf Miss Swaffer simply <i>Miss</i>)
+--it was to obtain their permission to marry.
+Swaffer heard him unmoved, dismissed him by a
+nod, and then shouted the intelligence into Miss
+Swaffer's best ear.  She showed no surprise, and
+only remarked grimly, in a veiled blank voice, 'He
+certainly won't get any other girl to marry him.'
+
+"It is Miss Swaffer who has all the credit of the
+munificence: but in a very few days it came out
+that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with a cot-
+tage (the cottage you've seen this morning) and
+something like an acre of ground--had made it
+over to him in absolute property.  Willcox expe-
+dited the deed, and I remember him telling me he
+had a great pleasure in making it ready.  It re-
+cited: 'In consideration of saving the life of my
+beloved grandchild, Bertha Willcox.'
+
+"Of course, after that no power on earth could
+prevent them from getting married.
+
+"Her infatuation endured.  People saw her go-
+ing out to meet him in the evening.  She stared
+with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where
+he was expected to appear, walking freely, with a
+swing from the hip, and humming one of the love-
+tunes of his country.  When the boy was born, he
+got elevated at the 'Coach and Horses,' essayed
+again a song and a dance, and was again ejected.
+People expressed their commiseration for a woman
+married to that Jack-in-the-box.  He didn't care.
+There was a man now (he told me boastfully) to
+whom he could sing and talk in the language of his
+country, and show how to dance by-and-by.
+
+"But I don't know.  To me he appeared to have
+grown less springy of step, heavier in body, less
+keen of eye.  Imagination, no doubt; but it seems
+to me now as if the net of fate had been drawn
+closer round him already.
+
+"One day I met him on the footpath over the
+Talfourd Hill.  He told me that 'women were fun-
+ny.'  I had heard already of domestic differences.
+People were saying that Amy Foster was begin-
+ning to find out what sort of man she had married.
+He looked upon the sea with indifferent, unseeing
+eyes.  His wife had snatched the child out of his
+arms one day as he sat on the doorstep crooning to
+it a song such as the mothers sing to babies in his
+mountains.  She seemed to think he was doing it
+some harm.  Women are funny.  And she had ob-
+jected to him praying aloud in the evening.  Why?
+He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud
+after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his old
+father when he was a child--in his own country.
+And I discovered he longed for their boy to grow
+up so that he could have a man to talk with in that
+language that to our ears sounded so disturbing,
+so passionate, and so bizarre.  Why his wife
+should dislike the idea he couldn't tell.  But that
+would pass, he said.  And tilting his head know-
+ingly, he tapped his breastbone to indicate that she
+had a good heart: not hard, not fierce, open to com-
+passion, charitable to the poor!
+
+"I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered
+whether his difference, his strangeness, were not
+penetrating with repulsion that dull nature they
+had begun by irresistibly attracting.  I won-
+dered. . . ."
+
+The Doctor came to the window and looked out
+at the frigid splendour of the sea, immense in
+the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all
+the hearts lost among the passions of love and
+fear.
+
+"Physiologically, now," he said, turning away
+abruptly, "it was possible.  It was possible."
+
+He remained silent.  Then went on--
+
+"At all events, the next time I saw him he was
+ill--lung trouble.  He was tough, but I daresay he
+was not acclimatised as well as I had supposed.  It
+was a bad winter; and, of course, these mountain-
+eers do get fits of home sickness; and a state of de-
+pression would make him vulnerable.  He was lying
+half dressed on a couch downstairs.
+
+"A table covered with a dark oilcloth took up all
+the middle of the little room.  There was a wicker
+cradle on the floor, a kettle spouting steam on the
+hob, and some child's linen lay drying on the
+fender.  The room was warm, but the door opens
+right into the garden, as you noticed perhaps.
+
+"He was very feverish, and kept on muttering
+to himself.  She sat on a chair and looked at him
+fixedly across the table with her brown, blurred
+eyes.  'Why don't you have him upstairs?' I
+asked.  With a start and a confused stammer she
+said, 'Oh! ah! I couldn't sit with him upstairs,
+Sir.'
+
+"I gave her certain directions; and going out-
+side, I said again that he ought to be in bed up-
+stairs.  She wrung her hands.  'I couldn't.  I
+couldn't.  He keeps on saying something--I don't
+know what.'  With the memory of all the talk
+against the man that had been dinned into her ears,
+I looked at her narrowly.  I looked into her short-
+sighted eyes, at her dumb eyes that once in her life
+had seen an enticing shape, but seemed, staring at
+me, to see nothing at all now.  But I saw she was
+uneasy.
+
+"'What's the matter with him?' she asked in a
+sort of vacant trepidation.  'He doesn't look very
+ill.  I never did see anybody look like this be-
+fore. . . .'
+
+"'Do you think,' I asked indignantly, 'he is
+shamming?'
+
+"'I can't help it, sir,' she said stolidly.  And
+suddenly she clapped her hands and looked right
+and left.  'And there's the baby.  I am so fright-
+ened.  He wanted me just now to give him the
+baby.  I can't understand what he says to it.'
+
+"'Can't you ask a neighbour to come in to-
+night?' I asked.
+
+"'Please, sir, nobody seems to care to come,' she
+muttered, dully resigned all at once.
+
+"I impressed upon her the necessity of the
+greatest care, and then had to go.  There was a
+good deal of sickness that winter.  'Oh, I hope he
+won't talk!' she exclaimed softly just as I was go-
+ing away.
+
+"I don't know how it is I did not see--but I
+didn't.  And yet, turning in my trap, I saw her
+lingering before the door, very still, and as if med-
+itating a flight up the miry road.
+
+"Towards the night his fever increased.
+
+"He tossed, moaned, and now and then muttered
+a complaint.  And she sat with the table between
+her and the couch, watching every movement and
+every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable ter-
+ror, of that man she could not understand creeping
+over her.  She had drawn the wicker cradle close
+to her feet.  There was nothing in her now but the
+maternal instinct and that unaccountable fear.
+
+"Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he de-
+manded a drink of water.  She did not move.  She
+had not understood, though he may have thought
+he was speaking in English.  He waited, looking at
+her, burning with fever, amazed at her silence and
+immobility, and then he shouted impatiently,
+'Water!  Give me water!'
+
+"She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child,
+and stood still.  He spoke to her, and his passion-
+ate remonstrances only increased her fear of that
+strange man.  I believe he spoke to her for a long
+time, entreating, wondering, pleading, ordering, I
+suppose.  She says she bore it as long as she could.
+And then a gust of rage came over him.
+
+"He sat up and called out terribly one word--
+some word.  Then he got up as though he hadn't
+been ill at all, she says.  And as in fevered dismay,
+indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her
+round the table, she simply opened the door and ran
+out with the child in her arms.  She heard him call
+twice after her down the road in a terrible voice--
+and fled. . . .  Ah! but you should have seen stir-
+ring behind the dull, blurred glance of these eyes
+the spectre of the fear which had hunted her on
+that night three miles and a half to the door of Fos-
+ter's cottage!  I did the next day.
+
+"And it was I who found him lying face down
+and his body in a puddle, just outside the little
+wicket-gate.
+
+"I had been called out that night to an urgent
+case in the village, and on my way home at day-
+break passed by the cottage.  The door stood open.
+My man helped me to carry him in.  We laid him
+on the couch.  The lamp smoked, the fire was out,
+the chill of the stormy night oozed from the cheer-
+less yellow paper on the wall.  'Amy!' I called
+aloud, and my voice seemed to lose itself in the
+emptiness of this tiny house as if I had cried in a
+desert.  He opened his eyes.  'Gone!' he said dis-
+tinctly.  'I had only asked for water--only for a
+little water. . . .'
+
+"He was muddy.  I covered him up and stood
+waiting in silence, catching a painfully gasped
+word now and then.  They were no longer in his
+own language.  The fever had left him, taking
+with it the heat of life.  And with his panting
+breast and lustrous eyes he reminded me again of a
+wild creature under the net; of a bird caught in a
+snare.  She had left him.  She had left him--sick
+--helpless--thirsty.  The spear of the hunter had
+entered his very soul.  'Why?' he cried in the pen-
+etrating and indignant voice of a man calling to a
+responsible Maker.  A gust of wind and a swish of
+rain answered.
+
+"And as I turned away to shut the door he pro-
+nounced the word 'Merciful!' and expired.
+
+"Eventually I certified heart-failure as the im-
+mediate cause of death.  His heart must have in-
+deed failed him, or else he might have stood this
+night of storm and exposure, too.  I closed his eyes
+and drove away.  Not very far from the cottage I
+met Foster walking sturdily between the dripping
+hedges with his collie at his heels.
+
+"'Do you know where your daughter is?' I
+asked.
+
+"'Don't I!' he cried.  'I am going to talk to
+him a bit.  Frightening a poor woman like this.'
+
+"'He won't frighten her any more,' I said.
+'He is dead.'
+
+"He struck with his stick at the mud.
+
+"'And there's the child.'
+
+"Then, after thinking deeply for a while--
+
+"'I don't know that it isn't for the best.'
+
+"That's what he said.  And she says nothing at
+all now.  Not a word of him.  Never.  Is his im-
+age as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and
+striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from
+our fields?  He is no longer before her eyes to ex-
+cite her imagination into a passion of love or fear;
+and his memory seems to have vanished from her
+dull brain as a shadow passes away upon a white
+screen.  She lives in the cottage and works for Miss
+Swaffer.  She is Amy Foster for everybody, and
+the child is 'Amy Foster's boy.'  She calls him
+Johnny--which means Little John.
+
+"It is impossible to say whether this name re-
+calls anything to her.  Does she ever think of the
+past?  I have seen her hanging over the boy's cot
+in a very passion of maternal tenderness.  The lit-
+tle fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened
+at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with
+his fluttered air of a bird in a snare.  And looking
+at him I seemed to see again the other one--the
+father, cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish
+in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Amy Foster, by Joseph Conrad
+
diff --git a/old/afost10.zip b/old/afost10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e0d7241
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/afost10.zip