In the last years of Queen Victoria's reign, Ned, a middle-class schoolboy whose parents are working abroad, spends his Summer holiday in the Bedfordshire countryside with his great-uncle Silas. Silas is sixty, but very hearty and still attractive to women. He does odd jobs and poaches on the sly, to the horror of his long-suffering housekeeper Mrs. Betts. His son Abel is getting married, and, at the wedding reception, Silas recalls his own happy times with his late wife by singing her favourite song with his new daughter-in-law.