The thing had not escaped the notice of Snarley Bob, and I could see wrath in his eyes. Being near him, I asked what it meant. "By God!" he said, "it's a good job for Tom Barter as the rheumatiz has crippled my old hands. If I could only double my fist, I'd put a mark on his silly jaw as 'ud stop him singing that song for many a day to come. Not that there's any sense in it. But it's just because there's no sense in 'em that such songs oughtn't to be sung. See that young woman go out just now? Well, she's in a decline, and knows as she can't last very long. And she's got a young man in India--in the same battery as our Bill--as nice and straight a lad as ever you see." Another song was called "Fallen Leaves," the singer being a son of Peter Shott, the local preacher--a young man of dissipated appearance, with a white face and an excellent tenor voice. This song, of course, was a disquisition on the evanescence of all things here below. Each verse began "I saw," and ended with the refrain: "Fallen leaves, fallen leaves! With woe untold my bosom heaves, Fallen leaves, fallen leaves!" "I saw," said the song, a mixed assortment of decaying glories--among them, a pair of lovers on a seat, a Christmas family party, a rosebush, a railway accident on Bank Holiday, a rake's deathbed, a battlefield, an oak tree in its pride, and the same oak in process of being converted by an undertaker into a coffin for the poet's only friend. All these and many more the poet "saw" and buried in his fallen leaves, assuring the world that his bosom heaved with woe untold for every one of them. Tom Barter, who was the leading emotionalist in the parish, was visibly affected, his bosom heaving in a manner which the poet himself could not have excelled; while his poor anaemic wife, who had hesitated about coming to the feast because her eye was still discoloured from the blow Tom had given her last week, feebly expressed the hope "that it would do him good." So it went on. Whatever jocund rebecks may have sounded in the England of long ago, their strains found no echo in the funeral ditties of the Perrymans' feast. Snarley Bob, in whom the drink had kindled some hankering for eternal splendours, was well content with the singing of "The Farmer's Boy," and joined in the chorus with the remnants of a once mighty voice. After that he became restless and increasingly snappish; his face darkened at "Fallen Leaves," and he began to look positively dangerous when a young man who was a railway porter in town, now home for a holiday, made a ghastly attempt at merriment by singing a low-class music-hall catch. What he would have done or said I do not know, for at that moment the announcement was made which the reader has been expecting--that Mrs. Abel would give a recitation.