For the cottagers, to be sure, his eccentricity consisted rather in his being a 'gentleman,' yet neither eating flesh, drinking wine, nor telling them how they ought to behave themselves, together with the way he would sit down on anything and listen to what they had to tell him, without giving them the impression that he was proud of himself for doing so.

In fact, it was the extraordinary impression he made of listening and answering without wanting anything either for himself or for them, that they could not understand.

How on earth it came about that he did not give them advice about their politics, religion, morals, or monetary states, was to them a never-ending mystery; and though they were too well bred to shrug their shoulders, there did lurk in their dim minds the suspicion that 'the good gentleman,' as they called him, was 'a tiddy-bit off.' He had, of course, done many practical little things toward helping them and their beasts, but always, as it seemed, by accident, so that they could never make up their minds afterward whether he remembered having done them, which, in fact, he probably did not; and this seemed to them perhaps the most damning fact of all about his being--well, about his being--not quite all there.

Another worrying habit he had, too, that of apparently not distinguishing between them and any tramps or strangers who might happen along and come across him.

This was, in their eyes, undoubtedly a fault; for the village was, after all, their village, and he, as it were, their property.