 - in fact he is a gentleman who adopted it for urgent personal
reasons in the first year of his existence.
    Furthermore, a charming non-Scottish lady, of strict veracity and admitted
penetration, the wife of a well-known Caledonian, came to the writer shortly
after the story was first published, and inquired if Farfrae were not drawn from
her husband, for he seemed to her to be the living portrait of that (doubtless)
happy man. It happened that I had never thought of her husband in constructing
Farfrae. I trust therefore that Farfrae may be allowed to pass, if not as a
Scotchman to Scotchmen, as a Scotchman to Southerners.
    The novel was first published complete, in two volumes, in May 1886.
                                                                            T.H.
    February 1895 - May 1912.
 

                                       I

One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third
of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were
approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They
were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had
accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a
disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.
    The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in
profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular. He
wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit,
which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same,
tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas. At his back
he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the
crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the
aperture. His measured, springless walk was the walk of the skilled countryman
as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the
turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical
indifference personal to himself, showing its presence even in the regularly
interchanging fustian folds, now in the left leg, now in the right, as he paced
along.
    What was really peculiar, however, in this couple's progress, and would have
attracted the attention of any casual observer otherwise disposed to overlook
them, was the perfect silence they preserved. They walked side by side in such a
way as to suggest afar off the low, easy, confidential chat of people full of
reciprocity; but on closer view it could be discerned that
