"you can tell me what is ready?"
"Even that I cannot do," he answered; "but I doubt not that the landlord
can inform us." On this he rang the bell, and a fellow answered, to whom
I put the same question.
"What would you have?" he asked.
I thought of the master, and I ordered a cold leg of pork to be washed
down with tea and beer.
"Did you say tea _and_ beer?" asked the landlord.
"I did."
"For twenty-five years have I been in business," said the landlord, "and
never before have I been asked for tea and beer."
"The gentleman is joking," said the man with the shining coat.
"Or else--" said the elderly man in the corner.
"Or what, sir?" I asked.
"Nothing," said he--"nothing." There was something very strange in this
man in the corner--him to whom I had spoken of Dafydd-ap-Gwilyn.
"Then you are joking," said the landlord.
I asked him if he had read the works of my master, George Borrow. He
said that he had not. I told him that in those five volumes he would
not, from cover to cover, find one trace of any sort of a joke. He would
also find that my master drank tea and beer together. Now it happens
that about tea I have read nothing either in the sagas or in the bardic
cnylynions, but, whilst the landlord had departed to prepare my meal, I
recited to the company those Icelandic stanzas which praise the beer of
Gunnar, the long-haired son of Harold the Bear. Then, lest the language
should be unknown to some of them, I recited my own translation, ending
with the line--
If the beer be small, then let the mug be large.
I then asked the company whether they went to church or to chapel. The
question surprised them, and especially the strange man in the corner,
upon whom I now fixed my eye. I had read his secret, and as I looked at
him he tried to shrink behind the clock-case.
"The church or the chapel?" I asked him.
"The church," he gasped.
"_Which_ church?" I asked.
He shrank farther behind the clock. "I have never been so questioned,"
he cried.
I showed him that I knew his secret, "Rome was not built in a day," said
I.
"He! He!" he cried. Then, as I turned away, he put his head from behind
the clock-case and tapped his forehead with his forefinger. So also did
the man with the shiny coat, who stood before the empty fireplace.
Having eaten the cold leg of pork--where is there a better dish, save
only boiled mutton with capers?--and having drunk both the tea and the
bee
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