He was now an old man, and to the younger generation seemed patriarchal; he had been called Daddy for more years than anybody could remember. But he was healthy and strong, for he had always taken care of himself; he could shoot with the best of them still, and could sit up all night and look fresh and rosy after his shower-bath in the morning. “You young ’uns have no stamina,” he said once to Brancepeth when he found that young man measuring the drops of his digitalis. “It is the way you were brought up. In my time we were fed on bread and milk, and rice-pudding, and wore low frocks till we were eight or nine, and never even saw what the grown-up folks ate. You were all of you muffled up to your chins in the nurseries, and got at by the doctors, and plied with wine and raw meat, and told that you had livers and lungs and digestions before you could toddle, and given claret and what not at luncheon, and made old men of you before you were boys. Dilitation of the heart, have you got? Hypertrophy, eh? Lord bless my soul, you shouldn’t know you’ve got a heart, except as a figure of speech, when you swear it away to a woman.” Everybody listened to Daddy even in an age which never listens: he was so obviously always right; he had so evidently found out the secret of an evergreen vitality; he was so sagaciously and unaffectedly devoted to himself, his selfishness was just tempered by that amount of good nature, when it cost him nothing, which makes a person popular; he was naturally good-natured and _serviable_ and kindly when to be so caused him no difficulty; he would even take a little trouble for people when he liked them, and he liked a great many. On the whole, he was a happy and very sensible creature, and if his existence was one long egotism and inutility--if he were really of no more value than a snail on a cabbage-leaf--if the alpha and omega of existence were comprised for him in his own comfort, he was at least pleasant to look at and to listen to, which cannot always be said of persons of great utility. Daddy, moreover, though a very prudent creature, did patch up some quarrels, prevent some scandals, remove some misunderstandings amongst his numerous acquaintances, but it was because he liked smooth waters around his own little barque; life ought to be comfortable, he thought; it was short, it was bothered, it was subject to unforeseen accident, and it was made precarious by draughts, fogs, model stoves, runaway horses, and orange peel on the pavement; but as far as it could be kept so, it ought to be comfortable. All his philosophy centred in that; and it was a philosophy which carried him along without friction. If Daddy Gwyllian never borrowed, he also never lent half-a-crown; but he got other people to lend it to other people, and this is the next most attractive social qualification which endears us to our friends.