I met an old gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with whom I have a slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he asked me whether I remembered Walker of The Daily News. No, said I, he was before my time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the 'seventies.

“Before that,” said the old gentleman. “Must have been in the 'sixties.”

“Probably,” I said. “Did you know him in the 'sixties?”

“Oh, I knew him before then,” said the old gentleman, warming to his subject. “I knew him in the 'forties.”

I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.

“Heavens!” said I, “the 'forties!”

“No,” said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a better view across the ages. “No.... It must have been in the 'thirties.... Yes, it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school together in the 'thirties. We called him Sawney Walker.”

I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I had paid him the one compliment that appealed to him—the compliment of astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.

His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked “well set” for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his hundred at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement was mixed with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent vanity is the last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last infirmity that humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that rages around Dean Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the angels. I want to feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are moving upwards in the scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round and round and biting our tail. I think the case for the ascent of man is stronger than the Dean admits. A creature that has emerged from the primordial slime and evolved a moral law has progressed a good way. It is not unreasonable to think that he has a future. Give him time—and it may be that the world is still only in its rebellious childhood—and he will go far.

But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We are vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of his acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all the year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes at the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots and his cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of mine who, in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing boots to the children at a London school, heard one day a little child pattering behind her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of the beneficiaries “keeping up” with her. She turned and recognised the wearer. “So you've got your new boots on, Mary?” she said. “Yes,” said little Mary grandly. “Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.” And though, as we grow older, we cease to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we find other material to keep the flame of vanity alive. “What for should I ride in a carriage if the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?” said the Fifer, putting his head out of the window. He spoke for all of us. We are all a little like that. I confess that I cannot ride in a motor-car that whizzes past other motor-cars without an absurd and irrational vanity. I despise the emotion, but it is there in spite of me. And I remember that when I was young I could hardly free-wheel down a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior to the man who was grinding his way up with heavings and perspiration. I have no shame in making these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that you, sir (or madam), will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite audible echo of yourself.

And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we are vain of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our neighbours as we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our neighbours. We are like the old maltster in “Far from the Madding Crowd,” when Henery Fray claimed to be “a strange old piece, goodmen.”

“A strange old piece, ye say!” interposed the maltster in a querulous voice. “Ye be no old man worth naming—no old man at all. Yer teeth bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis a poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore—a boast weak as water.”

It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences when the maltster had to be pacified.

“Weak as water, yes,” said Jan Coggan. “Malter, we feel ye to be a wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.”

“Nobody,” said Joseph Poorgrass. “Ye be a very rare old spectacle, malter, and we all respect ye for that gift.”

That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in being “a very rare old spectacle.” We count the reigns we've lived in and exalt the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes at midnight. Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite early, as in the case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of Cicero who was only in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as an old man and wrote his “De Senectute,” exalting the pleasures of old age. In the eyes of the maltster he would never have been an old man worth naming, for he was only sixty-four when he was murdered. I have noticed in my own case of late a growing tendency to flourish my antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure in recalling the 'seventies to those who can remember, say, only the 'nineties, that my fine old friend in the lane had in talking to me about the 'thirties. I met two nice boys the other day at a country house, and they were full, as boys ought to be, of the subject of the cricket. And when they found I was worth talking to on that high theme, they submitted their ideal team to me for approval, and I launched out about the giants that lived in the days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds of “W. G.” and Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G. Steel, and many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their stature did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those memories as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I shall be proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning nurse. She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant vanity we are soothed to sleep.

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