V]
MATILDA JANE.
71
drink
it's good for the most of them but there's some as is too weak to stand agin' temptations: it's a thousand pities, for them, as they ever built the Golden Lion at the corner there!""The Golden Lion?" I repeated.
"It's the new Public," my hostess explained. "And it stands right in the way, and handy for the workmen, as they come back from the brickfields, as it might be to-day, with their week's wages. A deal of money gets wasted that way. And some of 'em gets drunk."
"If only they could have it in their own houses
" I mused, hardly knowing I had said the words out loud."That's it!" she eagerly exclaimed. It was evidently a solution, of the problem, that she had already thought out. "If only you could manage, so's each man to have his own little barrel in his own house
there'd hardly be a drunken man in the length and breadth of the land!"And then I told her the old storybar
about a certain cottager who bought himself a little barrel of beer, and installed his wife as