"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