When he walked down the streets with his head drooping towards the pavement and his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat the grown-ups would say, “There goes poor Mr. X. wool-gathering as usual”; and we children used to wonder what he did with all the wool and where he found it to gather.  Perhaps he collected it from the thorn-bushes whereon the sheep had scratched themselves, or perhaps, being a magician, he had found a way to shear the flocks that we often saw in the sky on fine and windy days.  At all events, for a while his strange calling made us regard him with interest as a man capable of doing dark and mysterious things.  Then the grown-ups tried to dispel our illusions by explaining that they only meant that he was absent-minded, a dreamer, an awful warning to young folk p. 198who had their way to make in the world.  This admirable moral lesson, like most of their moral lessons, failed because they did not appreciate the subtlety of our minds.  We saw that the wool-gatherer did no recognisable work, wore comfortably untidy clothes, walked in the mud as much as he wanted to, and, in fine, lived a life of enviable freedom; and we thought that on the whole when we grew up we should like to be wool-gatherers too.  Even the phrase “absent-minded” excited our admiration; for we knew that it would be a fine thing if our thoughts could travel in foreign countries, where there are parrots and monkeys loose in the woods, while our bodies were imprisoned in the schoolroom under the unsympathetic supervision of the governess of the moment.  Although we no longer credited him with being a magician, the tardy explanations of the grown-ups had, if anything, increased his glamour.  It seemed to us that he must be very wise.

He lived in an old house a little way out of the town, and the house stood in a garden after our own heart.  We knew by the p. 199shocked comments of our elders that it had formerly been cut and trimmed like all the other gardens with which we were acquainted, but it was now a perfect wilderness, a delightful place.  My brother and I got up early one morning when the dew was on the world and explored it thoroughly.  `We found a goat in an outhouse and could see the marks in the meadow that had once been a lawn, where he was tethered during the day.  The wool-gatherer was evidently in the habit of sitting under a tree that stood at one corner, for the earth was pitted with the holes that had been made by the legs of his chair.  Being a wise man, we thought it probable that he conversed with his goat and could understand the answers of that pensive animal, who wagged his beard at us when we peeped shyly into his den.  In the long grass by the tree we found a book bound like a school prize lying quite wet with the dew.  It was full of cabalistic signs, and we took care to leave it where we found it lest it should be black magic, though now I would support the theory that Mr. X. read his Homer in the original.  Taking it p. 200altogether, it was the most sensible garden we had ever seen, with plenty of old fruit-trees, but with none of those silly flower-beds that incommode the careless feet of youth.  Our expedition enhanced our opinion of the wool-gatherer’s wisdom.

Here at least was a grown-up person who knew how to live in a decent fashion, and when he ambled by us in the market-place, his muddy boots tripping on the cobbles, and the pockets of his green-grey overcoat pulled down by the weight of his hands, our eyes paid him respectful tribute.  He really served a useful purpose in our universe, for he showed us that it was possible to grow old without going hopelessly to the bad.  Sometimes, considering the sad lives of our elders who did of their own free will all the disagreeable things that we were made to do by force, we had been smitten with the fear that in the course of years we, too, wou............