im of swearing
on such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in the
scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he sought.

"If you say such things--"

He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. "The towel!" he would
cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the towel! I'll
let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel! I'll give
up everything, I tell you--everything!"...

At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I was
in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it happened.
I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain,
shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and
slashing away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had
tied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half were
rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe in
both hands and slogged. Great wipes he made, and at each stroke he said,
"Take that!"

The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a
fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold tyranny,
the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After he
had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kicked
holes in two of our noblest marrows, flicked off the heads of half a row
of artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber
frame. Something of the awe of that moment returns to me as I write of
it.

"Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent
happiness, "I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like
reasonable beings. I've had enough of this"--his face was convulsed for
an instant with bitter resentment--"Pandering to cabbages."

4

That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is
that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston and
nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, and the
other is that my father as he went along talked about himself, not so
much to me as to himself, and about life and what he had done with
it. He monologued so that at times he produced an effect of weird
world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at that time not
understanding many things that afterwards became plain to me. It is only
in recent years that I have discovered the pathos of that monologue; how
friendless my father was and un