“Yes, I’m a ’underd an’ six, an’ healthy enough in a general way, But that don’t signify much in these times, when ye meet a couple o’ dozen centurions a day. I can manage a dozen mile afoot; can dig, read, an’ holler, an’ chaw, But, lor’ bless ye! that’s nothing now: lots do all that, an’ more. An’ in Ireland, they tell me, centurions grow on every blackberry-bush, so to speak, An’ corsties the Guv’ment in ole-age pensions thousands an’ thousands a week. I suppose it must be something, don’t ye think, in the hair? For at Brighton, where the hair is, there’s dozens an’ dozens o’ centurions _there_. No, I don’t mean the ’air of yer ’ed, but the hair of the sky-- It’s difficult to make you townsfolk unnerstand, however you try. An’ ‘Centenarians’ _you_ say. Why, no! Centurions _I’ve_ allus carled ’em, an’ allus shell, Although I daresay that way o’ yourn may do ’most as well. I don’t ’old with yer new-fangled words: they’re all very fine-- Like now, when you have your dinner, you say you are ‘going to dine.’ You don’t seem to me to get fatter on ‘dining’ than ‘dinner:’ ’Fact, it seems some’ow to me, you’re all o’ you worried an’ thinner. Eh! what was the country like when I wer’ young? Well, it’s an old, old story now, forgotten ever so long. In them days there was hedges, an’ ellums in the hedge-rows, An’ hazels, an’ blackberry brakes, an’ bracken, an’ goodness knows How many wild-flowers there. The roads suttingly was rather muddy; But the children used to go to the hedges for what they carled ‘Nature Study.’ ‘Not much nature now,’ you say. No: ye see the world got so clever, it ’ad to go, An’ now if ye wanted to see a cowslip or a buttercup, I don’t know what ye could do: P’raps they’ve got a speciment or two in the Natural Mystery Museum, An’ if I was you, I’d go to South Kensington, an’ try an’ see ’em. ‘Hist’ry,’ you say, ‘not Myst’ry’; well, maybe so, ’tis arl the same to me-- _I_ don’t care, not at arl, whichever o’ them it be! Pretty things, an’ simple they was: I ’aven’t seen none fer half a sentry, I’m sure; ’Cos the gardeners took ’em in hand, an’ cultivated ’em till they didn’t resemble their own selves no more. Look ahere! Ye see this yer flower what looks like a double-daffodil gone mad:-- Well: _that_ was ’riginally a buttercup, before it was super-cultivated, me lad! They cut down the hedges an’ trees, an’ straightened every one o’ the winding ways That was to be found everywhere in them oncultivated days. For, ye see, they’d got moty-cars of such extryornary power Which ’ud do well up to 80 or 90 miles an hour. An’ when, after coming, sudden-like, round the corners, they’d killed a good proportion of the population, They was looked upon with something near vexation. With a long, straight road, when a motor’s heard, an ’umming in the distance, You can ’op aside like winking, an’ so save your existence; But on a winding road it wasn’t no manner o’ good, I declare, They was onto, an’ over you, before ackshully you knew they was there. An’ now there’s rails, ’stead of hedges, an’ there ain’t now no dust, nor trees; An’ England’s just the same from end to end, an’ never no kind o’ diff’rence you sees. Why, when I wer’ a lad, there were ’ardly two places the same: Each ’ad it’s own character, just as every one its own name. But now they tell me the Orkneys is a’most the same as Pegwell Bay, An’ Paddington an’ Penzance own brothers, an’ Hastings an’ Eastbourne, an’ such places as they, Ain’t got never a pin to choose between:-- Ah! things is very diff’rent to what they used to been.”