o escape the brunt of moving in, probably, Perkins took Tony
to a football match at Plymouth. It was not so much that they drank a
great deal, as that they came home, singing, in a very overcrowded and
smoky railway carriage. "I s'pose I got exzited like," Tony says. He
was all right until they got out into the fresh air, and then ...
Perkins brought him in house and laid him along the passage. "Here's
your husband, Mrs Widger." Being rather afraid of Mrs Widger, because
she always speaks her mind, Perkins disappeared quickly.

[Sidenote: _TONY ON DRINK_]

_In vino veritas_, no doubt. When Tony is drunk he becomes most
affectionate, and begins 'slatting things about'--not violently or
maliciously, but simply out of joyous devilment and a desire to feel
that he is doing something. Mrs Widger neither wept nor upbraided him.
"Yu silly gert fule!" she said. "Yu silly gert fule! Shut up, or yu'll
wake they chil'ern."

"Be glad tu see yer Tony?"

"G'out! Git yer butes off."

Tony made the chairs skip round the room and thought he'd like to see
the table (with the lamp) upside down. The window curtains annoyed him.
Mrs Widger took steps.

Luckily, she is not with child, or otherwise delicate, and can
therefore stand a deal of rough and tumble. She pushed him headlong
into a chair and took off his boots. (Those two, there alone, for Under
Town was asleep.) Then she shouldered him upstairs, like a heavy piece
of luggage, and laid him on their bed. Poor Tony was more than leery.
He swam. He moaned. He was sick. He could neither lie down nor get up.
"Sarve thee damn well right!" said Mam Widger.

"_I_ can't help o'it...."

"_Yu can't help o'it!_"

Between three and four in the morning, she went downstairs, relighted
the fire and made him and herself a cup o' tay. After that, not so very
long before daylight, they slept.

To-day Tony is ill and subdued, if not repentant. He reckons he will do
the same again ("What chap don't, 'cept they mump-headed long-faced
beggars?"), but at present he turns from liquor; he always does for a
day and a half after 'going on the bust.' "Didn' ought never to drink
more'n one glass," he says; "no, n'eet none at all!" Seeing what it
would mean for the family if Tony took to drink, Mrs Widger is, and was
at the time, wonderfully calm and cheerful--how far from reliance in
herself, or from trust in Tony, is not plain. I asked her what she
would do if he became a drunkard and brought no mone