His whole form looked wasted and shrunken, and John Hammond thought he had never seen so old a man--or at any rate any man who was so deeply marked with all the signs of extreme age; and yet in the backwoods of America he had met ancient settlers who remembered Franklin, and who had been boys when the battle of Bunker's Hill was fresh in the memory of their fathers and mothers.
The little old man was clad in a thick grey overcoat of some shaggy kind of cloth which looked like homespun.

He wore a felt hat, and carried a thick oak stick, and there was nothing in his appearance to indicate that he belonged to any higher grade than that of the shepherds and guides with whom Hammond had made himself familiar during his previous visit.

And yet there was something distinctive about the man, Hammond thought, something wild and uncanny, which made him unlike any of those hale and hearty-looking dalesmen on whom old age sate so lightly.

No, John Hammond could not fancy this man, with his pallid countenance and pale crafty eyes, to be of the same race as those rugged and honest-looking descendants of the Norsemen.
Perhaps it was the man's exceeding age, for John Hammond made up his mind that he must be a centenarian, which gave him so strange and unholy an air.

He had the aspect of a man who had been buried and brought back to life again.
So might look one of those Indian Fakirs who have the power to suspend life by some mysterious process, and to lie in the darkness of the grave for a given period, and then at their own will to resume the functions of the living.