AN OUTCAST 251 



or stopping footpaths; they cannot be kept out of harm, 

 however rich. How well this man would have employed 

 money : he would have given it away ! 



By and by his pity for goaded cattle and his frequent 

 gazings into their brown eyes as they stared at him by a 

 stile still further reduced his necessities he would touch 

 no meat; so that his companion, finding him no longer of 

 much use in spite of his possession of but one arm, left 

 him and only crossed his path at increasing intervals of 

 time. It was now that Jones remembered with horror 

 a scene which had slumbered in his mind with the fear 

 which it originally roused in youth. He and other boys 

 were in the habit of peeping through a hole in the wall 

 of a slaughter-house and watching the slaughter, the 

 skinning and the cutting up, until their ears became 

 familiar with the groans, the screams, the gurglings, tKe 

 squelchings in the half-darkness of candle-light, the blood 

 and white faces and the knife. But one day there was 

 led into the slaughter-house a white heifer fresh from the 

 May pasture, clean and bright from her gleaming rosy 

 hoofs to the tips of the horns that swayed as she walked. 

 Her breath made, as it were, a sacred space about her as 

 the light of a human face will do. She stood quiet but 

 uncertain and musingly in the dark, soaked, half-ruinous 

 place, into which light only came in bars through a cob- 

 webbed lattice and fell that day upon her white face, 

 leaving in darkness the tall butcher and the imbecile 

 assistant who held the rope by which the animal's head 

 was drawn down to the right level for a blow. The men 

 were in no hurry and as the heifer was not restive they 

 finished their talk about Home Rule. Then the idiot tried 

 to put her into the right position, but for a time could 



