would be exactly fitted:  and yet he’s the biggest person I have ever met; he carries us all along with him, like a river.  You can’t resist him, you can’t contradict him.  That is the one danger, that he exerts more influence than he knows, so that when you are with him, it is hard to be quite yourself.  But he puts the wind into your sails; and, my word, he can take it out of your sails, if he likes!  I have only seen him really angry about twice, and then it was really appalling.  Once was when a man lied to him, and once was when a man was impertinent to him.  He simply blasted them with his displeasure—­that is the only word.  He hates getting angry—­I expect he had a bad temper once—­and he apologises afterwards; but it’s no use—­it’s like a thunderstorm apologising to a tree which has been struck.  I don’t think he knows his strength.  He believes himself to be sensitive and weak-willed—­I have heard him say so.  The fact is that he dislikes doing an unpleasant thing or speaking severely; and he will take a lot of trouble to avoid a scene, or to keep an irritable man in a good temper.  But if he lets himself loose!  I can’t express to you the sort of terror I have in thinking of those two occasions.  He didn’t say very much, but he looked as if he were possessed by any number of devils.”

“He was never married, I suppose?” I said.

“No,” said Barthrop, “and yet he seems to make friends with women very easily—­in fact, they tend to fall in love with him, if I may say so.  He has got a beautiful manner with them, and he is simply devoted to children.  You will see that they really rather worship him in the village.  He knows everyone in the place, and never forgets a fact about them.”

“What does he do mostly?” I said.

“I really don’t know,” said Barthrop.  “He is rather a solitary man.  He very often has one of us in for an hour in the evening or morning—­but we don’t see much of him in the afternoon; he gardens or walks about.  He has a quick eye for things, birds and plants, and so on; and he can find more nests in an hour than any man I ever saw.  Sometimes he will go and shut himself up in the church—­he is rather fond of going to church; he always goes to the Communion.”

“Does he expect us to go?” I said.

“No,” said Barthrop.  “He rather likes us to go, but he doesn’t at all like us going to please him.  ‘I want you to want to go,’ I heard him say once, ‘but I don’t want you to go because I want you.’  And he has no particular views, I think, about the whole thing—­at least not for other people.”

“Tell me some more about him,” I said.