Tales of the Wild and the Wonderful

On the south-west coast of the principality of Wales stands a romantic little village, inhabited chiefly by the poorer class of people, consisting of small farmers and oyster dredgers, whose estates are the wide ocean, and whose ploughs are the small craft, in which they glide over its interminable fields in search of the treasures which they wring from its bosom; it is built on the very top of a hill, commanding on the one side an immense bay, and on the other, of the peaceful green fields and valleys, cultivated by the greater part of its quiet inhabitants.  The approach to it from the nearest town was by a road, which branched away into lanes and wooded walks, and from the sea by a beautiful little bay, running up far into the land; both sides of which and indeed all the rest of the coast were guarded by craggy and gigantic rocks, some of them hollowing into caverns, into which none of the inhabitants, from motives of superstition, reverence, and fear, had ever dared to penetrate.  There were, at the period of which we are about to treat, no better sort of inhabitants in the little village just described, none of those so emphatically distinguished as “quality” by the country people; they had neither parson, lawyer, nor doctor, among them, and of course there was a tolerable equality among the residents.  The farmer, who followed his own plough in the spring, singing the sweet wild national chaunt of the season, and bound up with his own hands his sheaves in autumn, was not richer, greater, nor finer, than he who, bare-legged on the strand, gathered in the hoar weeds for the farmer in the spring, or dared the wild winds of autumn and the wrath of the winter in his little boat, to earn with his dredging net a yet harder subsistence for his family.  Distinctions were unknown in the village, every man was the equal of his neighbour.

But, though rank and its polished distinctions were strange in the village of N—, the superiority of talent was felt and acknowledged almost without a pause or a murmur.  There was one who was as a king amongst them, by the mere force of a mightier spirit than those with whom he sojourned had been accustomed to feel among them: he was a dark and moody man, a stranger, evidently of a higher order than those around him, who had a few months before settled among them: he was poor, but had no occupation—he lived frugally, but quite alone—and his sole occupation was to read during the day, and wander out unaccompanied into the fields or by the beach during the night.  Sometimes indeed he would relieve a suffering child or rheumatic old man by medicinal herbs, reprove idleness and drunkenness in the youth, and predict to all the good and evil consequences of their conduct; and his success in some cases, his foresight in others, and his wisdom in all, won for him a high reputation among the cottagers, to which his taciturn habits contributed not a little, for, with the vulgar as with the educated, no talker was ever seriously taken for a conjuror, though a silent man is often decided to be a wise one.