into the Rats' Cooler. There you had it; dark
old beams (who could believe they were put there a month ago?), great
casks set on end with legends such as Amontillado Fino done in gilt on
a black ground, tall steins filled with German beer soft as moss, and a
German waiter noiseless as moving foam. He who entered the Rats'
Cooler at three of a summer afternoon was buried there for the day. Mr.
Golgotha Gingham spent anything from four to seven hours there of every
day. In his mind the place had all the quiet charm of an interment, with
none of its sorrows.

But at night, when Mr. Smith and Billy, the desk clerk, opened up the
cash register and figured out the combined losses of the caff and the
Rats' Cooler, Mr. Smith would say:

"Billy, just wait till I get the license renood, and I'll close up this
damn caff so tight they'll never know what hit her. What did that lamb
cost? Fifty cents a pound, was it? I figure it, Billy, that every one of
them hogs eats about a dollar's worth a grub for every twenty-five cents
they pay on it. As for Alf--by gosh, I'm through with him."

But that, of course, was only a confidential matter as between Mr. Smith
and Billy.

I don't know at what precise period it was that the idea of a petition
to the License Commissioners first got about the town. No one seemed to
know just who suggested it. But certain it was that public opinion
began to swing strongly towards the support of Mr. Smith. I think it was
perhaps on the day after the big fish dinner that Alphonse cooked for
the Mariposa Canoe Club (at twenty cents a head) that the feeling began
to find open expression. People said it was a shame that a man like Josh
Smith should be run out of Mariposa by three license commissioners. Who
were the license commissioners, anyway? Why, look at the license system
they had in Sweden; yes, and in Finland and in South America. Or, for
the matter of that, look at the French and Italians, who drink all day
and all night. Aren't they all right? Aren't they a musical people? Take
Napoleon, and Victor Hugo; drunk half the time, and yet look what they
did.

I quote these arguments not for their own sake, but merely to indicate
the changing temper of public opinion in Mariposa. Men would sit in the
caff at lunch perhaps for an hour and a half and talk about the license
question in general, and then go down into the Rats' Cooler and talk
about it for two hours more.

It was amazing the way the light br