THE END OF WINTER 25 



What dreams are there for that aged child who goes 

 tottering and reeling up the lane at mid-day ? He carries 

 a basket of watercress on his back. He has sold two- 

 pennyworth, and he is tipsy, grinning through the 

 bruises of a tipsy fall, and shifting his cold pipe from one 

 side of his mouth to the other. Though hardly sixty he 

 is very old, worn and thin and wrinkled, and bent side- 

 ways and forward at the waist and the shoulders. Yet he 

 is very young. He is just what he was forty years ago 

 when the thatcher found him lying on his back in the sun 

 instead of combing out the straw and sprinkling it with 

 water for his use. He laid no plans as a youth; he had 

 only a few transparent tricks and easy lies. Never has 

 he thought of the day after to-morrow. For a few years 

 in his prime he worked almost regularly for one or two 

 masters, leaving them only now and then upon long 

 errands of his own and known only to himself. It was 

 then perhaps that he earned or received as a gift, along 

 with a broken nose, his one name, which is Jackalone. 

 For years he was the irresponsible jester to a smug town- 

 let which was privately amused and publicly scandalized, 

 and rewarded him in a gaol, where, unlike Tasso, he never 

 complained. Since then he has lived by the sale of a chance 

 rabbit or two, of watercress, of greens gathered when the 

 frost is on them and nobody looking, by gifts of broken 

 victuals, by driving a few bullocks to a fair, by casual 

 shelter in barns, in roofless cottages, or under hedges. 



He has never had father or mother or brother or sister 

 or wife or child. No dead leaf in autumn wind or 

 branch in flooded brook seems more helpless. He can 

 deceive nqbody. He is in prison two or three times a 



