The veterinary lecturer at Cirencester College told me that during the cattle plague in the sixties he had a coat well worth L50 to any veterinary surgeon, so impregnated was it with the infection.  This man was fond of scoring off the students, and had a habit at the commencement of each lecture of holding a short viva voce examination on the subject of the last.  I remember when the tables were turned upon him by a ready-witted student.  The lecturer, who was a superior veterinary surgeon, detailed a whole catalogue of exaggerated symptoms exhibited by an imaginary horse, and selecting his victim added, with a chuckle, “Now, Mr. K., perhaps you will kindly tell us what treatment you would adopt under these circumstances?” K. was not a very diligent student, and the lecturer expected a display of ignorance, but his anticipated triumph was cut short by the reply:  “Well, if I had a horse as bad as all that I should send for the vet.”  The lecturer expostulated, but could get nothing further out of K., and was forced to recognize that the general laugh which followed was against himself.

At a post-mortem, however, he was more successful in his choice of a butt.  A dead horse with organs exposed was the object before the class, and the lecturer was asking questions as to their identification.  “Now, Mr. Jones, perhaps you will show us where his lungs are?” Jones made an unsuccessful search.  “Well, can we see where his heart is?” and so on—­all failures.  Finally and scornfully, “Well, perhaps you can show the gentlemen where his tail is!”

The village thatcher, Obadiah B., was an ancient, but efficient workman when engaged upon cottages or farm buildings, for ricks require only a comparatively temporary treatment.  He was paid by the “square” of 100 feet, and, although he was “no scholard,” and never used a tape, he was quite capable of checking by some method I could never fathom my own measurements with it.  The finishing touches to his work were adjusted with the skill of an artist and the accuracy of a mathematician; and a beautiful bordering of “buckles” in an elaborate pattern of angles and crosses—­“Fantykes” (Van Dycks), his hard-working daughter Sally called them—­completed the job.  He “reckoned” that each thatching would last at least twenty years, and being well stricken in years, or “getting-up-along” as they say in Hampshire, he would add gloomily, “I shall never do it no more.”  He was a true prophet, for on every building he thatched for me the work outlived him, and even after the lapse of thirty years is not completely worn out.

Passing him and his son in the village street, outside his house, when he was packing fruit for market, I heard him, his voice raised for my benefit, thus admonishing his son who was casually using some of the newer hampers:  “Allus wear out the old, fust.”  But I must not attribute to his son the unfilial retort which another youth made under similar circumstances, when told to fetch some more hampers from a shed some distance away:  “No, father, you fetch them, allus wear out the old fust, you know.”