TheCompleteMemoirsOfGeorgeSherston

except the Northern Folk-Ballad tunes which he was
fond of singing at odd moments. "The Bonny Earl of
Murray" was one of his favourites, and he sang it in
agreeably melancholy style. But much though I ad-
mired 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!59 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 remem-
ber one morning when he was shaving with one hand
and reading Robinson Crusoe in the other. Crusoe was
a real man, he remarked; fox-hunting 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 sup-
port 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 peace-time
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 Oak-

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