He was an old man, something under middle height, but looking as if he had once been taller; for his shoulders were much bent, and his head was sunk on his chest.  His whole form looked wasted and shrunken, and John Hammond thought he had never seen so old a man—­or at any rate any man who was so deeply marked with all the signs of extreme age; and yet in the backwoods of America he had met ancient settlers who remembered Franklin, and who had been boys when the battle of Bunker’s Hill was fresh in the memory of their fathers and mothers.

The little old man was clad in a thick grey overcoat of some shaggy kind of cloth which looked like homespun.  He wore a felt hat, and carried a thick oak stick, and there was nothing in his appearance to indicate that he belonged to any higher grade than that of the shepherds and guides with whom Hammond had made himself familiar during his previous visit.  And yet there was something distinctive about the man, Hammond thought, something wild and uncanny, which made him unlike any of those hale and hearty-looking dalesmen on whom old age sate so lightly.  No, John Hammond could not fancy this man, with his pallid countenance and pale crafty eyes, to be of the same race as those rugged and honest-looking descendants of the Norsemen.

Perhaps it was the man’s exceeding age, for John Hammond made up his mind that he must be a centenarian, which gave him so strange and unholy an air.  He had the aspect of a man who had been buried and brought back to life again.

So might look one of those Indian Fakirs who have the power to suspend life by some mysterious process, and to lie in the darkness of the grave for a given period, and then at their own will to resume the functions of the living.  His long white hair fell upon the collar of his grey coat, and would have given him a patriarchal appearance had the face possessed the dignity of age:  but it was a countenance without dignity, a face deeply scored with the lines of evil passions and guilty memories—­the face of the vulture, with a touch of the ferret—­altogether a most unpleasant face, Mr. Hammond thought.

And yet there was a kind of fascination about that bent and shrunken figure, those feeble movements, and shuffling gait.  John Hammond turned to look after the old man when he had passed him, and stood to watch him as he went slowly up the Fell, plant his crutch stick upon the ground before every footstep, as if it were a third leg, and more serviceable than either of the other two.

Mr. Hammond watched him for two or three minutes, but, as the old man’s movements had an automatic regularity, the occupation soon palled, and he turned and walked toward Fellside.  A few yards nearer the grounds he met James Steadman, walking briskly, and smoking his morning pipe.

‘You are out early this morning,’ said Hammond, by way of civility.

‘I am always pretty early, sir.  I like a mouthful of morning air.’