The Samphire Gatherer

At sunset, when the strong wind from the sea was beginning to feel
cold, I stood on the top of the sandhill looking down at an old woman
hurrying about over the low damp ground beneath--a bit of sea-flat
divided from the sea by the ridge of sand; and I wondered at her,
because her figure was that of a feeble old woman, yet she moved--I had
almost said flitted--over that damp level ground in a surprisingly
swift light manner, pausing at intervals to stoop and gather something
from the surface. But I couldn't see her distinctly enough to satisfy
myself: the sun was sinking below the horizon, and that dimness in the
air and coldness in the wind at day's decline, when the year too was
declining, made all objects look dim. Going down to her I found that
she was old, with thin grey hair on an uncovered head, a lean dark face
with regular features and grey eyes that were not old and looked
steadily at mine, affecting me with a sudden mysterious sadness. For
they were unsmiling eyes and themselves expressed an unutterable
sadness, as it appeared to me at the first swift glance; or perhaps not
that, as it presently seemed, but a shadowy something which sadness had
left in them, when all pleasure and all interest in life forsook her,
with all affections, and she no longer cherished either memories or
hopes. This may be nothing but conjecture or fancy, but if she had been
a visitor from another world she could not have seemed more strange to
me.

I asked her what she was doing there so late in the day, and she
answered in a quiet even voice which had a shadow in it too, that she
was gathering samphire of that kind which grows on the flat saltings
and has a dull green leek-like fleshy leaf. At this season, she
informed me, it was fit for gathering to pickle and put by for use
during the year. She carried a pail to put it in, and a table-knife in
her hand to dig the plants up by the roots, and she also had an old
sack in which she put every dry stick and chip of wood she came across.
She added that she had gathered samphire at this same spot every August
end for very many years.

I prolonged the conversation, questioning her and listening with
affected interest to her mechanical answers, while trying to fathom
those unsmiling, unearthly eyes that looked so steadily at mine.

And presently, as we talked, a babble of human voices reached our ears,
and half turning we saw the crowd, or rather procession, of golfers
coming from the golf-house by the links where they had been drinking
tea. Ladies and gentlemen players, forty or more of them, following in
a loose line, in couples and small groups, on their way to the Golfers'
Hotel, a little further up the coast; a remarkably good-looking lot
with well-fed