rus. She started singing:
swore at us for laughing at her. "I cude sing a song wi' anybody once,"
she said; and therewith she struck up a fine, very Rabelaisian old song
in many verses. She lifted up her face to the ceiling, blushed (I am
sure the Tough Old Stick blushed), and in a high cracked voice that
gradually gathered tone and force, she trolled her verses out. With an
infectious abandonment, we took up the chorus. After all, 'twas a song
of things that happen every day--one of those pieces of folk-humour
which makes life's seriousness bearable by carrying us frankly back to
the animal that is in us, that has been cursed for centuries and still
remains our strength.

Grannie Pinn's song was the event of the evening. Excited by her
efforts to the point of hardly knowing whether to laugh or cry, she
told us we were 'a pack o' gert fules,' and went. The other visitors
followed after.

"Don' know what yu feels like," said Tony when they were all gone. "I
feels more-ish. 'N hour agone I wer fit for bed, now I feels 's if I
cude sing for hours on end...."

[Sidenote: _THE NEW YEAR_]

"May as well welcome in the New Year now 'tis so late as 'tis," said
Mrs Widger, taking from one of her store-places a bottle of green
ginger-wine and another of fearful and wonderful 'Invalid Port' which,
as she remarked, 'ain't so strengthening as the port what gentry has.'
Tony added hot water to his ginger-wine, lay back in the courting
chair, plumped his feet on Mrs Widger's lap, and sang some more of
those sea songs that have such melancholy windy tunes and yet most
curiously stimulate one to action. I think it must be because they echo
that particular sub-emotional desperation which causes men to do their
reckless best--the desperation that the treacherous sea itself
engenders.

At a minute or two before twelve by the clock, the three of us went out
to the back door. When the cats had scuttled away, the narrow walled-in
garden was very still. By the light of the stars, shining like points
in the deep winter heavens, I could see the beansticks, the balks of
wood and the old masts and oars. I could also smell the drain. Tony, in
his stockinged feet, leant on his wife's shoulder while he raised first
one foot from the cold stones, and then the other. We were a little
hushed, with more than expectancy. So we waited; to hear the church
clock strike and to welcome in the New Year.

And we waited until Tony said that his feet were t