"Aye! you wouldn't rec'llect the first three years of them sixty, Mr.
Jellyband," quietly interposed Mr. Hempseed. "I dunno as I ever see'd an
infant take much note of the weather, leastways not in these parts, an'
_I_'ve lived 'ere nigh on seventy-five years, Mr. Jellyband."

The superiority of this wisdom was so incontestable that for the moment
Mr. Jellyband was not ready with his usual flow of argument.

"It do seem more like April than September, don't it?" continued Mr.
Hempseed, dolefully, as a shower of raindrops fell with a sizzle upon
the fire.

"Aye! that it do," assented the worth host, "but then what can you
'xpect, Mr. 'Empseed, I says, with sich a government as we've got?"

Mr. Hempseed shook his head with an infinity of wisdom, tempered
by deeply-rooted mistrust of the British climate and the British
Government.

"I don't 'xpect nothing, Mr. Jellyband," he said. "Pore folks like us is
of no account up there in Lunnon, I knows that, and it's not often as I
do complain. But when it comes to sich wet weather in September, and all
me fruit a-rottin' and a-dying' like the 'Guptian mother's first born,
and doin' no more good than they did, pore dears, save a lot more Jews,
pedlars and sich, with their oranges and sich like foreign ungodly
fruit, which nobody'd buy if English apples and pears was nicely
swelled. As the Scriptures say--"

"That's quite right, Mr. 'Empseed," retorted Jellyband, "and as I says,