A man is described twice in this poem, and the two descriptions barely seem to belong to the same person. First comes the stranger, who has read the newspaper: the man "has robbed two clubs", the judge cannot punish him enough, and "Hanging's too good by half". Then, at the inn, a Gipsy woman who knows him personally insists that he was "what I call a gentleman". Edward Thomas never says which of them is right. He lets each speak and leaves the reader to weigh them.
The stranger's verdict is built on very little. His proof of villainy is a photograph: "Look at his photograph! / A lady-killer!" He judges a face, not a life. His speech is all exclamation and certainty, and even the rhyme of "Salisbury" with "undoubtedly" has a pompous ring, as if the adverb were pounding the table. Then Thomas slips in a quiet joke at his expense. The stranger is "one / With crimes yet undiscovered or undone". The last word is the clever one. "Undiscovered" crimes have been committed and hidden, but "undone" ones haven't happened yet, so the man baying for the thief's neck is cast as a thief in waiting. In six lines the self-righteous voice has been made suspect.
The woman's speech works quite differently. The stranger's sentences are short and clipped, while hers wander, circle back and correct themselves. Her case for the man's gentlemanliness is touchingly odd. He "went along with Carrie", and when a baby came he "paid up so readily / His half a crown". Most readers would hardly call that generosity. The poem's best moment of comedy follows, when she hears how this sounds and tries to improve it: "A crown'd have been / More like him." The sentence breaks across the line so that "been" dangles on its own, and the pause feels like a woman reaching for a bigger figure than the true one. Her loyalty is partly affection and partly invention, and Thomas lets us see both. The rhyme of "been" with "mean" slides past almost unnoticed, so the whole thing sounds like talk rather than verse.
The couplets and the steady pentameter are worth noticing for this reason. The poem is made of nine rhymed pairs, a tidy form associated with neat argument and balance, yet it is run through with enjambment and ordinary phrasing like "me and Joe / Was anywhere near". The neat form holds the messy speech, much as the poem holds two clashing opinions without forcing a winner. The woman's definition of a gentleman comes from the way he treated her family. He told them to "be sure and call", and he "put his arms around our Amos all / As if he were his own son". Behind the word "gentleman" are two meanings: a man of rank, and a man who is kind. The thief of the clubs has the manners but, judging by the stranger's account, not the honesty. In the woman's eyes he has the warmth, and she counts that for more.
The ending turns the stranger's cry upside down. He wanted hanging; she prays, "God / Save him from justice!" Justice here is the enemy, and mercy is what the man needs. Her last line, "Nicer man never trod", is simple and final, and the "Oh!" she repeats earlier, tacked on to the ends of lines, sounds like a sigh of real fondness.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to settle. A thief can be a loving friend, and the people who know a man's faults least may judge him most harshly. The poem is only eighteen lines long, yet it says something uncomfortable about how readily we trust a photograph, a headline or a reputation over what someone has actually been like in a room with us. Thomas had an ear for rural speech, and here it does the moral work. The woman is not an authority and may well be wrong, but she is the only person in the poem who sounds like she is speaking from love, and that unsettles any easy verdict.