ired nothin'. You young ones wants t'l maind
yur own business, an' that'll--egh--kape yous busy. Where's me pipe,
d'ye hear, ey? An' the 'bacca? Yagh, that's it." The old man's fingers
crooked eagerly around the musty bowl. He lit, sucked, and puffed
noisily, lowering himself on a bench and feeling for the window-sill
with his elbow. "In my taime," he continued, presently, in an aggrieved
tone, "young ones was whopped fur talkin' up t'l thur elders like that.
Lave me be, now, an' go 'n' milk thame cows I just fetched. Poor beasts,
their bags es that full--ey, that full. They're blattin' to be eased."

With indulgent haste, the young couple, smiling sheepishly at each other
like big children rebuked, picked up their strainer-pails and went away
to the corral. The old man, his pipe-bowl glowing and blackening in time
to his pulling at it, smoked on alone in the dusk. In the nibbling,
iterative way of the old, he started a kind of reflection; but it was as
if a harmattan had blown along the usual courses of his thought, drying
up his little brooklet of recollection and withering the old aquatic
star-flowers that grew along its banks. His mind, in its meandering
among old images, groped, paused, fell pensive. His head sank lower
between his shoulders, and the shoulders eased back against the wall
behind his bench. When Jim Nixon and his wife, chasing each other
merrily back and forth across the dewy path like the frolicsome young
married couple they were, reached the door-yard, they found the old man
fallen "mopy" in a way uncommon for him, and quite given over to a
thoughtless, expressionless torpor and staring.

"You'll be tired-like, grampa, eh?" Jim Nixon said, as he came over to
the veteran and put a strong hand under Old Dalton's armpit. "Come on,
then. I'll help you off to your bed."

But the old man flamed up again, spiritedly, although perhaps this time
his protest was a little more forced. "Ye'll not, then, boy," he
mumbled. "Ye'll just lave me be, then. I'm--egh, egh"--he eased
gruntingly into a standing position--"I'm going to bed annyway, though."
He moved off, his coattail bobbing oddly about his hips and his back
bowed. The two heard him stump slowly up the stairs.

Jim Nixon drew the boot-jack toward him and set the heel of his boot
thoughtfully into the notch. "They go quick, Gracie," he observed, "when
they get as old as him. They go all at onct, like. Hand me thon cleaver,
an' I'll be makin' a little k