Well, I have set down the points, after all.  But it must not be thought that the gentleman with the pointed brown beard and thoughtful eyes, who at five minutes past twelve went up the two steps into the smoking-room, locked the doors, as he had been directed, took up his candle and went to bed, went with an uneasy conscience, or, in fact, was a villain in any way whatever.

CHAPTER III

(I)

The first spot in Frank’s pilgrimage which I have been able to visit and identify in such a way that I am able to form to myself a picture of his adventure more or less complete in all its parts, lies about ten miles north-west of Doncaster, in a little valley, where curiously enough another pilgrim named Richard lived for a little while nearly six hundred years ago.

Up to the time of Frank’s coming there, in the season of hay-making, numberless little incidents of his experience stand out, vivid, indeed, but fragmentary, yet they do not form to my mind a coherent whole.  I think I understand to some extent the process by which he became accustomed to ordinary physical hard living, into which the initiation began with his series of almost wholly sleepless nights and heavy sleep-burdened days.  Night was too strange—­in barns, beneath hay-ricks, in little oppressive rooms, in stable-lofts—­for him to sleep easily at first; and between his tramps, or in the dinner-hour, when he managed to get work, he would drop off in the hot sunshine down into depths of that kind of rest that is like the sea itself—­glimmering gulfs, lit by glimpses of consciousness of the grass beneath his cheek, the bubble of bird-song in the copses, stretching down into profound and utter darkness.

Of how the little happenings of every day wore themselves into a coherent whole, and modified, not indeed himself, but his manner of life and his experience and knowledge, I can make no real picture at all.  The first of these took place within ten miles of Cambridge on his first morning, and resulted in the bruised face which Mr. Harris noticed; it concerned a piece of brutality to a dog in which Frank interfered....  (He was extraordinarily tender to animals.) Then there was the learning as to how work was obtained, and, even more considerable, the doing of the work.  The amateur, as Frank pointed out later, began too vigorously and became exhausted; the professional set out with the same deliberation with which he ended.  One must not run at one’s spade, or hoe, or whatever it was; one must exercise a wearisome self-control ... survey the work to be done, turn slowly, spit on one’s hands, and after a pause begin, remembering that the same activity must show itself, if the work was to be renewed next day, up to the moment of leaving off.