hot roast beef and fresh-drawn ale. He held his head
on one side, and screwed up his mouth, as he nudged Bartle Massey, and
watched half-witted Tom Tholer, otherwise known as "Tom Saft,"
receiving his second plateful of beef. A grin of delight broke over
Tom's face as the plate was set down before him, between his knife and
fork, which he held erect, as if they had been sacred tapers; but the
delight was too strong to continue smouldering in a grin--it burst out
the next moment in a long-drawn "haw, haw!" followed by a sudden
collapse into utter gravity, as the knife and fork darted down on the
prey. Martin Poyser's large person shook with his silent unctuous
laugh; he turned toward Mrs. Poyser to see if she, too, had been
observant of Tom, and the eyes of husband and wife met in a glance of
good-natured amusement.

[Footnote 19: From Chapter LIII of "Adam Bede."]

But _now_ the roast beef was finished and the cloth was drawn, leaving
a fair large deal table for the bright drinking cans, and the foaming
brown jugs, and the bright brass candlesticks, pleasant to behold.
_Now_ the great ceremony of the evening was to begin--the harvest
song, in which every man must join; he might be in tune, if he liked
to be singular, but he must not sit with closed lips. The movement was
obliged to be in triple time; the rest was _ad libitum_.

As to the origin of this song--whether it came in its actual state
from the brain of a single rhapsodist, or was gradually perfected by a
school or succession of rhapsodists, I am ignorant. There is a stamp
of unity, of individual genius upon it, which inclines me to the
former hypothesis, though I am not blind to the consideration that
this unity may rather have arisen from that consensus of many minds
which was a condition of primitive thought foreign to our modern
consciousness. Some will perhaps think that they detect in the first
quatrain an indication of a lost line, which later rhapsodists,
failing in imaginative vigour, have supplied by the feeble device of
iteration; others, however, may rather maintain that this very
iteration is an original felicity to which none but the most prosaic
minds can be insensible.

The ceremony connected with the song was a drinking ceremony. (That is
perhaps a painful fact, but then, you know, we cannot reform our
forefathers.) During the first and second quatrain, sung decidedly
_forte_, no can was filled:

"Here's a health unto our master,