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In consequence of the fetes the house was full of company, the tables in the street were already surrounded by persons smoking and drinking the national small-beer, the public rooms were in a cloud of smoke, and Mr.
Tobacker'll kill 'em deader than small-beer. Why didn't I think about it before?" Shorty had some strong black plug tobacco. He cut this up into small pieces, while Si found an old tin can, into which they were put, and then the can filled up with boiling water.
His usual beverage was small-beer and cider, and Madeira wine. Of the latter he often drank several small glasses at a sitting. He took tea and toast, or a little well-baked bread, early in the evening; conversed with or read to his family when there were no guests; and usually, whether there was company or not, retired for the night at about nine o'clock.
On a low couch, free and unbound, he lay; by his side, on a rude table, was food and a jack of small-beer. Whether the time was morning or evening he could not tell, but it was very dark; what little light entered the room came through a narrow slit, high up in the wall, and all things smelled strangely of damp.
Give me pale sherry at dinner, and my twenty-three claret afterwards. 'What's port now? says Gosling; 'disgusting thick sweet stuff where's the old dry wine one USED to get? Until the last twelvemonth, Fledgling drank small-beer at Doctor Swishtail's; and Gosling used to get his dry old port at a gin-shop in Westminster till he quitted that seminary, in 1844.
I will not weary the reader with further details of my wandering with its disappointment and shattered illusions, which can in no way be of interest to any but the one in search of his past, and of purely sentimental importance to him. It is, of course, a common form of egotism to chronicle such small-beer of one's origin, but it happens to have nothing to do with my purpose.
"Then bring something to eat bring it to the gun-room instantly something for Captain Ormond and a bottle of Sir Lupus's own claret and two glasses " "Three glasses!" cried Ruyven. "Four!" "Five!" shouted Harry and Cecile. "Six!" added Samuel; and little Benny piped out, "Theven!" "Then bring two bottles, Cato," called out Dorothy. "I want some small-beer!" protested Benny.
The new scientific methods of Darwin and Mill were just then being eagerly discussed in England; and Buckle, an alert student and great admirer of Mill, in touch with the new movements of the day, proposed, "by applying to the history of man those methods of investigation which have been found successful in other branches of knowledge, and rejecting all preconceived notions which could not bear the test of those methods," to remove history from the condemnation of being a mere series of arbitrary facts, or a biography of famous men, or the small-beer chronicle of court gossip and intrigues, and to raise it to the level of an exact science, subject to mental laws as rigid and infallible as the laws of nature:
He was as communicative as hosts usually are: the crops and the markets, the price of beasts at last Castle Dermot fair, the last story about the vicar, and the last joke of Father Hogan the priest; how the Whiteboys had burned Squire Scanlan's ricks, and the highwaymen had been beaten off in their attack upon Sir Thomas's house; who was to hunt the Kilkenny hounds next season, and the wonderful run entirely they had last March; what troops were in the town, and how Miss Biddy Toole had run off with Ensign Mullins: all the news of sport, assize, and quarter-sessions were detailed by this worthy chronicler of small-beer, who wondered that my honour hadn't heard of them in England, or in foreign parts, where he seemed to think the world was as interested as he was about the doings of Kilkenny and Carlow.
I was the other day with honest Will Funnell, the West Saxon, who was reckoning up how much liquor had passed through him in the last twenty years of his life, which, according to his computation, amounted to twenty-three hogsheads of October, four ton of port, half a kilderkin of small-beer, nineteen barrels of cyder, and three glasses of champaigne; besides which he had assisted at four hundred bowls of punch, not to mention sips, drams, and whets without number.
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