As incidentally indicated above, a free recourse to alcoholic stimulus used to be, in less temperate days, closely associated with the culinary art; and one of the best cooks I ever knew was urged by her mistress to attend a great meeting for the propagation of the Blue Ribbon, to be held not a hundred miles from Southampton, and addressed by a famous preacher of total abstinence.  The meeting was enthusiastic, and the Blue Ribbon was freely distributed.  Next morning the lady anxiously asked her cook what effect the oratory had produced on her, and she replied, with the evident sense of narrow escape from imminent danger, “Well, my lady, if Mr. ——­ had gone on for five minutes more, I believe I should have taken the Ribbon too; but, thank goodness! he stopped in time.”

So far, I find, I have chiefly dealt with the Art of Putting Things as practised by the “urbane” or town-bred classes.  Let me give a few instances of “pagan” or countrified use.  A village blacksmith was describing to me with unaffected pathos the sudden death of his very aged father; “and,” he added, “the worst part of it was that I had to go and break it to my poor old mother.”  Genuinely entering into my friend’s grief, I said, “Yes; that must have been terrible.  How did you break it?” “Well, I went into her cottage and I said.  ‘Dad’s dead.’  She said, ‘What?’ and I said, ’Dad’s dead, and you may as well know it first as last.’” Breaking it!  Truly a curious instance of the rural Art of Putting Things.

A labourer in Buckinghamshire, being asked how the rector of the village was, replied, “Well, he’s getting wonderful old; but they do tell me that his understanding’s no worse than it always was”—­a pagan synonym for the hackneyed phrase that one is in full possession of one’s faculties.  This entire avoidance of flattering circumlocutions, though it sometimes produces these rather startling effects, gives a peculiar raciness to rustic oratory.  Not long ago a member for a rural constituency, who had always professed the most democratic sentiments, suddenly astonished his constituents by taking a peerage.  During the election caused by his transmigration, one of his former supporters said at a public meeting, “Mr. ——­ says as how he’s going to the House of Lords to leaven it.  I tell you, you can’t no more leaven the House of Lords by putting Mr. ——­ into it than you can sweeten a cart-load of muck with a pot of marmalade.”  During the General Election of 1892 I heard an old labourer on a village green denouncing the evils of an Established Church.  “I’ll tell you how it is with one of these ’ere State parsons.  If you take away his book, he can’t preach; and if you take away his gownd, he mustn’t preach; and if you take away his screw, he’ll be d——­d if he’ll preach.”  The humour which underlies the roughness of countrified speech is often not only genuine but subtle.  I have heard a story of a young labourer who, on his way to his day’s work, called at the registrar’s office to register