I

of his favourites, and he sang it in agreeably melancholy style. But much though I admired these plaintive ditties I could not believe that they abolished Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which we’d heard at the Concert. I realize now that what I ought to have said was “Oh rats, David!” Instead of which I clumsily tried to explain the merits of various composers other than the inventors of The Minstrelsy of the Border , which was exactly what he wanted me to do. Sometimes he made me quite angry. I remember one morning when he was shaving with one hand and reading Robinson Crusoe in the other. Crusoe was a real man, he remarked; foxhunting was the sport of snobs and half-wits. Since it was too early in the day for having one’s leg pulled, I answered huffily that I supposed Crusoe was all right, but a lot of people who hunted were jolly good sorts, and even great men in their own way. I tried to think of someone to support my argument, and after a moment exclaimed; “Anthony Trollope, for instance! He used to hunt a lot, and you can’t say he was a half-wit.” “No, but he was probably a snob!” I nearly lost my temper while refuting the slur on Trollope’s character, and David made things worse by saying that I had no idea how funny I was when I reverted to my peacetime self. “I had an overdose of the hunting dope when I was with the Second Battalion in ’15,” he added. “If I’d been able to gas about Jorrocks and say I’d hunted with the Bedfordshire Hounds all my life, the Colonel and the Adjutant would have behaved quite decently to me.” “You can’t be certain of that,” I replied, “and anyway, there’s no such thing as ‘the Bedfordshire Hounds.’ Bedfordshire’s mostly the Oakley, and that isn’t a first-class country either. You might as well get the names right when you’re talking through your hat about things you don’t understand.” What did it matter to David whether the Oakley was bordered by the Grafton, Fitzwilliam, and Whaddon Chase⁠—none of which I’d ever hunted with, but I knew they were good countries and I didn’t pretend that I wasn’t interested in them, and I strongly objected to them being sneered at by a crank⁠—yes, a fad-ridden crank⁠—like David. “You’re a fad-ridden crank,”