When he had marked down the line thus fixed, he returned to the doorway to copy another as before.
It being the month of August, when the pale face of the townsman and the stranger is to be seen among the brown skins of remotest uplanders, not only in England, but throughout the temperate zone, few of the homeward-bound labourers paused to notice him further than by a momentary turn of the head.

They had beheld such gentlemen before, not exactly measuring the church so accurately as this one seemed to be doing, but painting it from a distance, or at least walking round the mouldy pile.

At the same time the present visitor, even exteriorly, was not altogether commonplace.

His features were good, his eyes of the dark deep sort called eloquent by the sex that ought to know, and with that ray of light in them which announces a heart susceptible to beauty of all kinds,--in woman, in art, and in inanimate nature.

Though he would have been broadly characterized as a young man, his face bore contradictory testimonies to his precise age.