you will perceive
that there can be no fear of scandal attaching to her because of a visit
to a public-house, or she would not go there. It should be noted, as
evidence of a strict public opinion regulating the custom, that these
same women seldom enter the public-houses in the village, and never any
others save on this one occasion. They require the justification of
their weekly outing, when supper is delayed, and the burden of living
can be forgotten amongst friends for an hour. At other times they would
consider the indulgence disgraceful; and though they enjoy it just at
these times, I do not remember that I have ever seen one of them showing
the least sign of having carried her enjoyment too far.

The men certainly are governed by no such severe public opinion, but are
free to "get a drink" at any time without being thought the worse of by
their neighbours; yet they, too, for the most part, are of good and
sober character enough to prove that the village public-house cannot be
so utterly given up to evil as might be supposed from the horrified talk
of refined people. Not many men in this parish would tolerate a place in
which they could do nothing but get drunk. It is for something else that
they go to the Fox or the Happy Home. The drinking is but a pleasant
incident. They despise the fellow who merely goes in to have his
unsociable glass and be off again, as heartily as they dislike the
habitual soaker who brings their entertainment into disfavour; and they
themselves keep a rough sort of order--or they increase disorder in
trying to quell it--rather than that the landlord should interfere. That
loud harsh talk which one hears as one passes the public-house of an
evening is not what the hyper-sensitive suppose. It does not betoken
drunkenness so much as uncouth manners--the manners of neglected men
who spend their lives at severe physical labour, and want a little
relaxation in the evening. So far as I have seen, the usual conversation
in the taproom of a country public-house is a lazy and innocent
interchange of remarks, which wander aimlessly from one subject to
another, because nobody wants to bother his head with thinking; or else
it is a vehement discussion, in which dogmatic assertion does duty for
argument and loudness for force. In either case it rests and stimulates
the tired men, while the drink refreshes their throats, and it has no
more necessary impropriety than the drawing-room talk of the well-to-d