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.  To crown all, there was a story, full ten years old now, which had lost nothing in the telling, of his treatment of a cattle-drover.  To the village it had an eerie look, that windmill-like rage let loose upon a man who, after all, had only been twisting a bullock’s tail and running a spiked stick into its softer parts, as any drover might.  People said—­the postman and a wagoner had seen the business, raconteurs born, so that the tale had perhaps lost nothing—­that he had positively roared as he came leaping down into the lane upon the man, a stout and thick-set fellow, taken him up like a baby, popped him into a furzebush, and held him there.  People said that his own bare arms had been pricked to the very shoulder from pressing the drover down into that uncompromising shrub, and the man’s howls had pierced the very heavens.  The postman, to this day, would tell how the mere recollection of seeing it still made him sore all over.  Of the words assigned to Tod on this occasion, the mildest and probably most true were:  “By the Lord God, if you treat a beast like that again, I’ll cut your liver out, you hell-hearted sweep!”

The incident, which had produced a somewhat marked effect in regard to the treatment of animals all round that neighborhood, had never been forgotten, nor in a sense forgiven.  In conjunction with the extraordinary peace and mildness of his general behavior, it had endowed Tod with mystery; and people, especially simple folk, cannot bring themselves to feel quite at home with mystery.  Children only—­to whom everything is so mysterious that nothing can be—­treated him as he treated them, giving him their hands with confidence.  But children, even his own, as they grew up, began to have a little of the village feeling toward Tod; his world was not theirs, and what exactly his world was they could not grasp.  Possibly it was the sense that they partook of his interest and affection too much on a level with any other kind of living thing that might happen to be about, which discomfited their understanding.  They held him, however, in a certain reverence.