when even he will not be able
to find some odd job. Yet, as I know very well, when the pinch does
come he will go short and say nothing whatever to anybody. He will be
merely a shade more sarcastic. One of the children may come home saying
that 'thic Uncle Jake an't had half a pound of butter all this week,'
or that he has been in one of his passions with Aunt Jake for taking in
a loaf of bread without paying cash for it. He will bring out a
ha'penny from a little screw of newspaper to buy milk for his cats, and
he will take some crumbs to leave on dry rocks under the cliffs for the
robins that flutter after him there. "Poor things!" he'll say. And to
people he will still be saying what he thinks, fair or foul, gentle or
hard. To understand his sternness and his kindness, it needs to go with
him wrinkling in the sunshine and prawning in the dark. He is become
very like his beloved rocks and cliffs. He is, as one might say, a
voice for them, and his words and deeds are what one would expect their
words and deeds to be, did they not stand there, warm, sunny and
graciously coloured, or dark and stern, fronting the sea immovably, as
Uncle Jake fronts life. "Du _I_ want to die?" he says when asked his
age. "Why, I'd like to live a thousand years!"

14

[Sidenote: _NARCOTICS AND STIMULANTS_]

Tony is singularly free from any craving either for narcotics or
stimulants. Most people I know, especially those who do brain work or
live in cities, are satisfied if they can strike a working balance
between the two. Granfer must have his glass of beer regularly, but
neither smokes nor drinks much tea; Uncle Jake snuffs and loves his
tea, but drinks no alcohol whatever; John Widger smokes heavily; and I
have never known Mrs Widger get up in the morning without her cup o'
tay. Tony, on the other hand, smokes, for politeness' sake, an
occasional cigarette when it is offered him, does not hanker after his
tea, and scarcely ever drinks alone. He gets drunk now and then, not
because he greatly wants to, but socially; because, when half-a-dozen
of them are drinking in rounds, 'What can a fellow du?' Even then he
often leaves untouched a glassful that has been ordered for him, though
all the while after his third or fourth glass, he may be asking other
men to 'drink up and hae another.' Drinking with him is an expression
of jollity, not the means of it.

The Perkinses went at the end of last week into a jerry-built villa up
on land. T