He is evidently childish, and breaks now and then into an anile laugh at the thought, no doubt, of some dead old pot-house jest.

A complication arises through his persisting in taking me for a sister of Roger's, who died thirty years ago, in early girlhood, and addressing me accordingly.
I struggle a little for my identity, but, finding the effort useless, resign it.
"This poor ould person is quoite aimless," says his wife with dispassionate apology; "but what can you expect at noinety-one ?" (Her own years cannot be much fewer.) I say tritely that it is a great age.
"He's very fatiguin' on toimes!--that he is!" she continues, eying him with contemplated candor--"he crumbles his wittles to that extent that I 'ave to make him sit upo' the _News of the World_." As it seems to me that the conversation is taking a painful direction, I try to divert it by telling my news; but the bloom is again taken off it by the old man, who declines to be disabused of the idea that the Peninsular is still raging, and that it is Roger's _grandfather_ who is returning from that field of glory.

After a few more minutes, during which the old wife composedly tells me of all the children she has buried--she has to think twice before she can recollect the exact number--and in the same breath remarks, "How gallus bad their 'taters were last year," I take my departure, and leave the old man still nodding his weak old head, and chuckling to the kettle.
On first leaving the house, I feel dashed and sobered.

The inertness and phlegmatic apathy of dry and ugly old age seem to weigh upon and press down the passionate life of my youth, but I have not crossed a couple of ploughed fields and seen the long slices newly ploughed, lying rich and thick in the sun; I have not heard two staves of the throstle's loud song, before I have recovered myself.

I also begin to sing.