brewer’s manufacture—­a man who knows exactly what he likes, and arranges to meet the hardy digestion of the mower and the reaper.  He prefers a rather dark beer with a certain twang faintly suggestive of liquorice and tobacco, with a sense of ‘body,’ a thickness in it, and which is no sooner swallowed than a clammy palate demands a second gulp to wash away the relics of the first.  Ugh!  The second requires a third swig, and still a fourth, and appetite increasing with that it feeds on, the stream rushes down the brazen throat that burns for more.

Like the Northern demi-god who drank unwittingly at the ocean from a horn and could not empty it, but nevertheless caused the ebb of the sea, so our toper, if he cannot contain the cask, will bring it down to the third hoop if time and credit will but serve.  It would require a ganger’s staff to measure his capacity—­in fact, the limit of the labourer’s liquor-power, especially in summer, has never yet been reached.  A man will lie on his back in the harvest field, under a hedge sweet with the June roses that smile upon the hay, and never move or take his lips away till a gallon has entered into his being, for it can hardly be said to be swallowed.  Two gallons a day is not an uncommon consumption with men who swing the scythe or reaping-hook.

This of course is small beer; but the stuff called for at the low public in the village, or by the road just outside, though indescribably nauseous to a non-vitiated palate, is not ‘small.’  It is a heady liquid, which if anyone drinks, not being accustomed to it, will leave its effects upon him for hours afterwards.  But this is what the labourer likes.  He prefers something that he can feel; something that, if sufficiently indulged in, will make even his thick head spin and his temples ache next morning.  Then he has had the value of his money.  So that really good ale would require a very large bush indeed before it attracted his custom.

It is a marked feature of labouring life that the respectable inn of the village at which the travelling farmer, or even persons higher in rank, occasionally call, which has a decent stable, and whose liquors are of a genuine character, is almost deserted by the men who seek the reeking tap of the ill-favoured public which forms the clubhouse of all the vice of the village.  While the farmer or passing stranger, calling at the decent house really for refreshment, drinks but a glass or two and departs, the frequenters of the low place never quit their seats till the law compels them, so that for sixpence spent in the one by men with cheque-books in their pockets, five shillings are spent in the other by men who have not got a loaf of bread at home for their half-starving children and pinched wife.  To an unprincipled landlord clearly this sort of custom is decidedly preferable, and thus it is that these places are a real hardship to the licensed victualler whose effort it is to keep an orderly house.