"But although it amuses me to watch them," Sir Gaston continued, "I can't find much real satisfaction in it. My other daughter, Alison, is completely lost to me, except for letters, for her husband has taken her to Ceylon. And now Ann is going; and deprived of any society of the younger generation, which, however it may irritate us at times, helps us to keep young and in touch with the day (I can say 'topping' with the best of them, although 'wow-wow' is beyond me), I have no alternative but to become old. And old age has no kind of attractiveness. I have no patience with people who profess to enjoy growing old. They merely remind one of those lines of the American poet: Unto each man comes a day when his favorite sins all forsake him, And he complacently thinks he has forsaken his sins. Speaking for myself, who am nearing sixty, I would say that the only piece of satisfaction that the process of ageing has brought to me is the knowledge that the word 'unshrinkable' has no real basis in fact. But I do not call myself really old yet. Not till a young woman offers me her seat in a railway compartment will that tragedy really be mine. At that moment I shall know that all is up." CHAPTER XVIII IN WHICH SUSSEX VOICES ARE RAISED IN MELODY, UNCLE JONAH GIVES HIS MEMORY PLAY, AND WE MEET A NAPOLEONIC QUAKER We have just been down into Sussex to get some songs of which word had reached the Director, whose passion is the search for these ancient melodies. Where others hunt hares or foxes, he pursues the elusive ditty. Village after village he draws blank, without ever losing heart, and then is rewarded by hearing at last of some old gaffer to be met with at the Red Lion or Blue Boar or King's Head, no matter how far away, who once sang a rare good song and can still quaver out the ghost of it. Then the Director rises to his greatest heights, for although deep potations and himself are at enmity, yet in the interests of England and music he has had (to allay suspicion) to consume much ale and stand ever so much more before the melodist was ready to begin. Of course, not all his singers are in inns; he has found many in cottages, too; but the village public-house naturally remains the happiest hunting-ground. On this occasion we were bound for a private house to which the singer had been bidden. The party consisted of the Director of course with his little musical notebook, Naomi, and I. My duty was to take down the words, a far more difficult task, as I have pointed out again and again, than to get the music, because all the words are different, whereas, the tune is the same all through. An added difficulty for the word-transcriber is the fact that old Sussex labourers have few or no teeth, and Heaven alone knows what sometimes they sing: certainly they themselves do not.