accepted the piebald view or some modification of it; as, for

instance, Silas Durgan, who was heard to assert that "if he choses

to show enself at fairs he'd make his fortune in no time," and

being a bit of a theologian, compared the stranger to the man with

the one talent. Yet another view explained the entire matter by

regarding the stranger as a harmless lunatic. That had the

advantage of accounting for everything straight away.

Between these main groups there were waverers and compromisers.

Sussex folk have few superstitions, and it was only after the

events of early April that the thought of the supernatural was

first whispered in the village. Even then it was only credited

among the women folk.

But whatever they thought of him, people in Iping, on the whole,

agreed in disliking him. His irritability, though it might have

been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing

to these quiet Sussex villagers. The frantic gesticulations they

surprised now and then, the headlong pace after nightfall that

swept him upon them round quiet corners, the inhuman bludgeoning

of all tentative advances of curiosity, the taste for twilight

that led to the closing of doors, the pulling down of blinds,

the extinction of candles and lamps--who could agree with such

goings on? They drew aside as he passed down the village, and when

he had gone by, young humourists would up with coat-collars and

down with hat-brims, and go pacing nervously after him in imitation

The Invisible Man