48 
BIRDS IN A VILLAGE. 
intelligent curiosity and fellowship ; and his full 
face, bronzed with sixty or sixty-five 3'^ears' exposure 
to the weather, was genial, as if the sunshine that 
had so long beaten on it had not been all used up 
in painting his skin that deep rich colour, but had, 
some of it, filtered through the epidermis into the 
heart to make his existence pleasant and sweet. 
But it was a very rough-cast face, with shapeless 
nose and thick lips. He was short and broad- 
shouldered, always in the warm weather in his 
shirt-sleeves, a shirt of some very coarse material 
and of an earthen colour, his brown thick arms 
bare to the elbows. Waistcoat and trousers looked 
as if he had worn them for half his life, and had 
a marbled or mottled appearance as if they had 
taken the various tints of all the objects and 
materials he had handled or rubbed against in his 
life's work — wood, mossy trees, grass, clay, bricks, 
stone, rusty iron, and dozens more. He wore the 
field-labourer's thick boots; his ancient rusty felt 
hat had long lost its original shape ; and finally, 
to complete the portrait, a short black clay pipe 
was never out of his lips — never, at all events, 
when I saw him, which was often ; for every day 
as I strolled past his domain he would be on the 
outside of his hedge, or just coming out of his gate, 
invariably with something in his hand — a spade, 
a fork, or stick of wood, or an old empty fruit 
