(on the Conservative side) and read his newspaper and argued
craftily in taverns; and the styles and titles of great landowners by
whose estates they passed; and how to avoid the nets that were
perpetually spread by a predatory sex before the feet of the incautious
male. On the last point Barney Bill was eloquent; but Paul, with
delicious memories sanctifying his young soul, turned a deaf ear to his
misogyny. Barney Bill was very old and crooked and dried up; what
beautiful lady would waste her blandishments on him? Even the low-born
lasses with whom they at times consorted had scarce an eye for Barney
Bill. The grapes were sour. Paul smiled indulgently on the little
foible of his friend.

They jogged along the highroad on this blazing and dusty day. Their
bower of wicker chairs crackled in the heat. It was too hot for
sustained conversation. Once Barney Bill said: "If Bob"-Bob was the old
horse's unimaginative name--"if Bob doesn't have a drink soon his
darned old hide'll crack."

Ten minutes later: "Nothing under a quart'll wash down this dust."

"Have a drink of water," suggested Paul, who had already adopted this
care for drouth, with satisfactory results.

"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