Both gentlemen kept their heads uncovered in a suspense; they might for a word or two more of that savour have turned into the conveniently spacious meadow.  They were induced, on the contrary, to enter the channel of English humour, by hearing Chumley Potts exclaim:  ‘His nob!’ and all of them laughed at the condensed description of a good hit back, at the English party’s cost.

Laughter, let it be but genuine, is of a common nationality, indeed a common fireside; and profound disagreement is not easy after it.  The Dame professes to believe that ‘Carinthia Jane’ had to intervene as peacemaker, before the united races took the table in Esslemont’s dining-hall for a memorable night of it, and a contest nearer the mark of veracity than that shown in another of the ballads she would have us follow.  Whatever happened, they sat down at table together, and the point of honour for them each and every was, not to be first to rise from it.  Once more the pure Briton and the mixed if not fused English engaged, Bacchus for instrument this time, Bacchus for arbiter of the fray.

You may imagine! says the Dame.  She cites the old butler at Esslemont, ’as having been much questioned on the subject by her family relative, Dr. Glossop, and others interested to know the smallest items of the facts,’—­and he is her authority for the declaration that the Welsh gentlemen and the English gentlemen, ‘whatever their united number,’ consumed the number of nine dozen and a half of old Esslemont wine before they rose, or as possibly sank, at the festive board at the hour of five of the morning.

Years later, this butler, Joshua Queeney, ‘a much enfeebled old man,’ retold and enlarged the tale of the enormous consumption of his best wine; with a sacred oath to confirm it, and a tear expressive of elegiacal feelings.

‘They bled me twelve dozen, not a bottle less,’ she quotes him, after a minute description of his countenance and scrupulously brushed black suit, pensioner though he had become.  He had grown, during the interval, to be more communicative as to particulars.  The wines were four.  Sherry led off the parade pace, Hock the trot into the merry canter, Champagne the racing gallop, Burgundy the grand trial of constitutional endurance for the enforced finish.  All these wines, except the sparkling, had their date of birth in the precedent century.  ‘They went like water.’

Questioned anxiously by Dr. Glossop, Queeney maintained an impartial attitude, and said there was no victor, no vanquished.  They did not sit in blocks.  The tactics for preserving peace intermingled them.  Each English gentleman had a Welsh gentleman beside him; they both sat firm; both fell together.  The bottles or decanters were not stationary for the guest to fill his glass, they circulated, returning to an empty glass.  All drank equally.  Often the voices were high, the talk was loud.  The gentlemen were too serious to sing.