“A grown man’s thirst and a boy’s thirst is two entirely different things,” said Barney Bill sententiously.  “To spoil this grown-up thirst of mine with water would be a crime.”

A mile or so farther on the road he stretched out a lean brown arm and pointed.  “See that there clump of trees?  Behind that is the Little Bear Inn.  They gives you cool china pots with blue round the edge.  You can only have ’em if you asks for ’em, Jim Blake, the landlord, being pertickler-like.  And if yer breaks em—­”

“What would happen?” asked Paul, who was always very much impressed by Barney Bill’s detailed knowledge of the roads and the inns of England.

Barney Bill shook his head.  “It would break ’is ’eart.  Them pots was being used when William the Conqueror was a boy.”

“Ten-sixty-six to ten-eighty-seven,” said Paul the scholar.  “They mun be nine hundred years old.”

“Not quite,” said Barney Bill, with an air of scrupulous desire for veracity.  “But nearly.  Lor’ lumme!” he exclaimed, after a pause, “it makes one think, doesn’t it?  One of them there quart mugs—­suppose it has been filled, say, ten times a day, every day for nine hundred years—­my Gosh! what a Pacific Ocean of beer must have been poured from it!  It makes one come over all of religious-like when one puts it to one’s head.”

Paul did not reply, and reverential emotion kept Barney Bill silent until they reached the clump of trees and the Little Bear Inn.

It was set back from the road, in a kind of dusty courtyard masked off on one side by a gigantic elm and on the other by the fringe of an orchard with ruddy apples hanging patiently beneath the foliage.  Close by the orchard stood the post bearing the signboard on which the Little Bear, an engaging beast, was pictured, and presiding in a ceremonious way over the horse-trough below.  In the shade of the elm stretched a trestle table and two wooden benches.  The old inn, gabled, half-timbered, its upper story overhanging the doorway, bent and crippled, though serene, with age, mellow in yellow and russet, spectacled, as befitted its years, with leaded diamond panes, crowned deep in secular thatch, smiled with the calm and homely peace of everlasting things.  Its old dignity even covered the perky gilt inscription over the doorway, telling how James Blake was licensed to sell a variety of alcoholic beverages.  One human figure alone was visible, as the chairs and mat-laden van slowly turned from the road toward the horse-trough—­that of a young man in straw hat and grey flannels making a water-colour sketch of the inn.

Barney Bill slid off the footboard, and, looking neither to right nor left, bolted like a belated crab into the cool recesses of the bar in search of ambrosia from the blue-and-white china mug.  Paul, also afoot, led Bob to the trough.  Bob drank with the lusty moderation of beasts.  When he had assuaged his thirst Paul backed him into the road and, slinging over his head a comforting nosebag, left him to his meal.