One man worked with the field women or in the same field. He was a poor, weedy creature, getting old and not very strong and they had put him upon half-pay. He was known as “Algy” and was not a native, but had appeared there suddenly, years before, out of a past he never mentioned. He was tall and thin and stooping, with watery blue eyes and long ginger side-whiskers of the kind then known as “weepers.” Sometimes, when he straightened his back, the last vestiges of a military bearing might be detected, and there were other grounds for supposing he had at some time been in the Army. When tipsy, or nearly so, he would begin, “When I was in the Grenadier Guards…” a sentence that always tailed off into silence. Although his voice broke on the high notes and often deteriorated into a squeak, it still bore the same vague resemblance to that of a man of culture as his bearing did to that of a soldier. Then, instead of swearing with “d ——s” and “b——s” as the other men did, he would, when surprised, burst into a “Bai Jove!” which amused everybody, but threw little light on his mystery.

Twenty years before, when his present wife had been a widow of a few weeks’ standing, he had knocked at her door during a thunderstorm and asked for a night’s lodging, and had been there ever since, never receiving a letter or speaking of his past, even to his wife. It was said that during his first days at field work his hands had blistered and bled from softness. There must have been great curiosity in the hamlet about him at first; but it had long died down and by the ‘eighties he was accepted as “a poor, slack-twisted crittur,” useful for cracking jokes on. He kept his own counsel and worked contentedly to the best of his power. The only thing that disturbed him was the rare visit of the German band. As soon as he heard the brass instruments strike up and the pom, pom of the drum, he would stick his fingers in his ears and run, across fields, anywhere, and not be seen again that day.