a poorly clad girl, with a
sweet, intelligent face, put a handkerchief to her mouth and stifle a
sob. She quietly made her way towards the barn door, and presently
slipped out into the night.

The thing had not escaped the notice of Snarley Bob, and I could see
wrath in his eyes. Being near him, I asked what it meant. "By God!" he
said, "it's a good job for Tom Barter as the rheumatiz has crippled my
old hands. If I could only double my fist, I'd put a mark on his silly
jaw as 'ud stop him singing that song for many a day to come. Not that
there's any sense in it. But it's just because there's no sense in 'em
that such songs oughtn't to be sung. See that young woman go out just
now? Well, she's in a decline, and knows as she can't last very long.
And she's got a young man in India--in the same battery as our Bill--as
nice and straight a lad as ever you see."

Another song was called "Fallen Leaves," the singer being a son of Peter
Shott, the local preacher--a young man of dissipated appearance, with a
white face and an excellent tenor voice. This song, of course, was a
disquisition on the evanescence of all things here below. Each verse
began "I saw," and ended with the refrain:

"Fallen leaves, fallen leaves!
With woe untold my bosom heaves,
Fallen leaves, fallen leaves!"

"I saw," said the song, a mixed assortment of decaying glories--among
them, a pair of lovers on a seat, a Christmas family party, a rosebush,
a railway accident on Bank Holiday, a rake's deathbed, a battlefield, an
oak tree in its pride, and the same oak in process of being converted by
an undertaker into a coffin for the poet's only friend. All these and
many more the poet "saw" and buried in his fallen leaves, assuring the
world that his bosom heaved with woe untold for every one of them.

Tom Barter, who was the leading emotionalist in the parish, was visibly
affected, his bosom heaving in a manner which the poet himself could not
have excelled; while his poor anaemic wife, who had hesitated about
coming to the feast because her eye was still discoloured from the blow
Tom had given her last week, feebly expressed the hope "that it would do
him good."

So it went on. Whatever jocund rebecks may have sounded in the England
of long ago, their strains found no echo in the funeral ditties of the
Perrymans' feast.

Snarley Bob, in whom the drink had kindled some hankering for eternal
splendours, was well content with the singing of