When his offer was refused, he wrung my hand in silence, and then turned eastwards towards his home.
I watched him till he disappeared in the crowd, a forlorn and pathetic figure, not without dignity in his strange old-world garb.
AN ALIEN[1]
"No, I ain't got it, ma'am; he says I'm a foreigner. I filled up the papers same as you told me, and then the gentleman called and asked for the birth-certificate, same as you said he would. 'I ain't got it,' I says. 'I suppose when I was born children were too common and folks too busy to go twenty miles down the hillside to crow over a baby at Carlisle Town Hall. There were fifteen of us all told, and my father only a farm labourer; if he went abroad the work stayed at 'ome, and 'e'd no time for gallivanting with seventeen mouths to fill. But I've got my baptism here all right; my mother was a pious body, and as soon as she could stand up she went to be churched and take the new stranger to be washed free of original sin in font-water; 'ere's the date written on it, 1837—year Queen Victoria began her most happy reign—you'll believe that, I suppose, in a parson's 'andwriting? Stands to reason I was born afore I was christened; they couldn't put the cross on my forehead, now could they, till my face was out in the world? Silly talk, I calls it, so now don't say no more, but pay me that five shillings and give me the book with the tickets—same as other ladies!'
"'You've lost your domicile,' he says.
"'Don't know what that is,' I says.
"'Married a foreigner,' he says.
"'Well, and if I did, that ain't no business of yours, my lad; you weren't born nor thought of and he died afore you come near this wicked world. He's been dead wellnigh on fifty year, so 'e didn't cross your path to worry you. Couldn't talk English? I says as 'e talked a deal better than you. I understood what 'e says, and I can't make 'ead nor tail of your silly talk, my lad, so there. Coverture? No—I ain't 'eard of that—no, nor naturalization either; you go down and fetch up Mrs. Nash—she's a rare scholard, she is—such a one for her books and poetry. Perhaps she'll make sense of your long words, for I can't. I lived afore the school-boards, and all the schooling I got I found out for myself sitting up in bed at night a-teaching myself to read and write. Not as I think much of all the larning myself; the girls can't keep a 'ome together as we used, and though the boys sit at the school desks a-cyphering till they are grown young men, they seem allus out of work at the end of it,' I says.