"Really one may say that father there is three-double."
"Crooked folk will last a long while." said the maltster,
grimly, and not in the best humour.
"Shepherd would like to hear the pedigree of yer
life, father -- wouldn't ye, shepherd?
"Ay that I should." said Gabriel with the heartiness
of a man who had longed to hear it for several months.
"What may your age be, malter?"
The maltster cleared his throat in an exaggerated
form for emphasis, and elongating his gaze to the
remotest point of the ashpit! said, in the slow speech
justifiable when the importance of a subject is so
generally felt that any mannerism must be tolerated
in getting at it, "Well, I don't mind the year I were
born in, but perhaps I can reckon up the places I've
lived at, and so get it that way. I bode at Upper Long-
puddle across there" (nodding to the north) "till I were
eleven. I bode seven at Kingsbere" (nodding to the
east) "where I took to malting. I went therefrom to
Norcombe, and malted there two-and-twenty years, and-
two-and-twenty years I was there turnip-hoeing and
harvesting.
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