midday
Cause and effect were not one from birth in him ; and the result was a most wistful expression , as though the lost intellect were for ever struggling and failing to recall its ancient mastery . Mostly he was a gentle young man , noteworthy for nothing but the uncomplaining patience with which he daily observed the monotonous routine of simple duties that were now all-sufficient for the poor life that had `` crept so long on a broken wing . '' He milked the big , red , barrel-bodied cow , and churned industriously for butter ; he kept the little vegetable garden in order and nursed the Savoys into fatness like plumping babies ; he drove the goats to pasture on the mountain slopes , and all day sat among the rhododendrons , the forgotten soul behind his eyes conning the dead language of fate , as a foreigner vainly interrogates the abstruse complexity of an idiom . By-and-by I made it an irregular habit to accompany him on these shepherdings ; to join him in his simple midday meal of sour brown bread and goat-milk cheese ; to talk with him desultorily , and study him the while , inasmuch as he wakened an interest in me that was full of speculation . For his was not an imbecility either hereditary or constitutional . From the first there had appeared to me something abnormal in it -- a suspension of intelligence only , a frost-bite in the brain that presently some April breath of memory might thaw out . This was not merely conjectural , of course .