"You must be a very aged man, malter, to have sons growed mild and ancient," he remarked.
"Father's so old that 'a can't mind his age, can ye, father ?" interposed Jacob.

"And he's growed terrible crooked too, lately," Jacob continued, surveying his father's figure, which was rather more bowed than his own.

"Really one may say that father there is three-double." "Crooked folk will last a long while," said the maltster, grimly, and not in the best humour.
"Shepherd would like to hear the pedigree of yer life, father-- wouldn't ye, shepherd ?" "Ay that I should," said Gabriel with the heartiness of a man who had longed to hear it for several months.

"What may your age be, malter ?" The maltster cleared his throat in an exaggerated form for emphasis, and elongating his gaze to the remotest point of the ashpit, said, in the slow speech justifiable when the importance of a subject is so generally felt that any mannerism must be tolerated in getting at it, "Well, I don't mind the year I were born in, but perhaps I can reckon up the places I've lived at, and so get it that way.

I bode at Upper Longpuddle across there" (nodding to the north) "till I were eleven.