At that time Old Town hung, as it were, between the Past and the Future. It had not shaken off the one, and yet could not resist the other. Beneath it was New Town, a growing industrial city, absorbing workers of every kind from every quarter; stretching back from the sea to Rodmill and overrunning the marshes at an incredible speed; with the slums, the Sunday agitators, the Salvationists and reformers, the rumble of discontent, that mark the cities of our day. Beyond it lay the immemorial countryside with shepherds on the hills, oxen ploughing in the valleys, villages clustered about the village-green, the squire, the public-house, the parish-church as in the days of Elizabeth. Old Town still slept upon its hill about the parish-church, but the murmur of the ungainly offspring at its feet disturbed slumbers that had endured for centuries. In its steep streets you might hear the undulating Sussex tongue, little changed from Saxon times, clashing in vain conflict with the aggressive cockney phrase and accent which is conquering the British Isles as surely, if as slowly, as did the English of the men of the Elbe in by-gone days. Ernie was of the older life; Alf of the new. Their very speech betrayed them: for the elder boy's tongue was touched with the slow, cawing music of the shepherds and labourers with whom he loved to consort, while Alf's was the speech of a city rat, sharp, incisive, twanging. In the holiday Ern worked on the hill in the harvest, and was known to all the men and most of the animals at the Moot Farm, just across the Lewes Road. Once, in the early spring, he passed the night out in Shadow Coombe, and came home fearfully just before school. His mother was shaking the mat at the front-door. "Where you been then?" she asked ferociously. "With the shepherd in his hut," answered Ernie. "Dis lambin time. His boy's run'd away." The lad's manifest truthfulness disarmed the angry woman. Alf peeped round his mother's skirts. "Did he give you anythink?" he asked. "I didn't ask him for nohun," Ern answered, aggrieved. Alf sneered. "Fat 'ead!" he cried. "Aynt arf soft, Ern aynt!" Their father, dressing at the upper window, heard the conversation and agonized. Tolerant as was Edward Caspar of grammatical solecisms, his ear, sensitive as Lady Blanche's, writhed at the mangling of vowels by his second son. His wife, who came from the Bucks border of the great city on the Thames, had indeed the Cockney phrase but not the offending accent. When he came downstairs, in a moment of despair, he poured his troubles into Anne's unsympathetic ear. "What a way to talk!" he groaned. "I don't see it matters," his wife answered grimly. "_They_ aren't going to Harrow and Trinity." The big man winced. It was a real grief to him that his sons were not to have in life the advantages that he believed himself to have been given. "You needn't throw that up at me," he grumbled into his brown beard.