“The same here—­Poison!” Mr Latter agreed, delicately indicating where “here” lay for him.

“My father ever kept a generous table, which he was in a position to afford.”  Mrs Polsue sighed, and added with resignation, “I suppose we must say that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

“I wouldn’ put it just like that, ma’am-not from what I’ve heard of the old gentleman’s knowledge o’ liquor.”

“It will bear hardly on you, Latter, if the King and Parliament should put the country under Prohibition?”

["Drabbet the old cat!” murmured Mr Latter to himself.  “She’s fishing to get at my banking account, and a lot she’d interfere if ’twas the workhouse with me to-morrow.”]

Aloud he said, rubbing his thumb on the edge of the augur and preparing to make incision upon the cask, “Well, ma’am, I reckon as the Lord will provide mortification enough for us before we’re out o’ this business, without our troublin’ to get in ahead.  The way I looks at it is, ‘Let’s be cheerful.’  In my experience o’ life there’s no bank like cheerfulness for a man to draw upon, to keep hisself fit and industrious.  What’s more—­if I may say it—­’most every staid man, afore he gets to forty, has pretty well come to terms with his innards.  He knows—­if you’ll excuse the figger o’ speech, ma’am—­ what’s the pressure ‘pon the boiler, an’ how to stoke it.  There’s folks,” said Mr Latter delicately, “as can’t stoke hot tea upon sossiges:  an’ likewise there’s folks as’ll put forth their best on three goes o’ whisky.  So why not live an’ let live?”

“They say,” answered Mrs Polsue, “that the Czar has been advised to prohibit the sale of vodka throughout his vast dominion.”

“What’s the beverage, ma’am?  I don’t seem to know it.”

“Vodka.”

“Oh, well:  very likely he has his reasons. . . .  It sounds a long way off.”

“But that,” Mrs Polsue persisted, reproducing what she had assimilated from her newspaper,—­“that is what folks in Polpier cannot be made to understand.  At this moment the Germans are nearer than we are to London, as the crow flies; and here are our working classes living on honey and roses, like a City of the Plain.  What are our young men thinking about?”

“Why, ma’am,” said Mr Latter, by this time busy with the cask, “they’re takin’ it slow, I’ll own, an’ they don’t say much.  To begin with, ‘tis their natur’; an’ next, ’tis a bit more they risk than you or me, if I may make bold to say so.  Then there’s the mothers an’ sweethearts pullin’ ’em back.”

“Tut!  If I had a sweetheart—­”

“Oh, certainly, ma’am!” agreed Mr Latter.  “That if wars there had been, you’d have driven him to the nearest, I make no doubt at all; though your departed—­if I may make so bold—­was never the sort to hurt a fly. . . .  Though, by God,” wound up Mr Latter in an inaudible murmur as he blew the sawdust from the vent-hole, “the man must have had pluck, too, in his way!”