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This bar-room used to be famous for drinking and story-telling, and sometimes fighting, in old times. But the bar of Pollard's Tahvern no longer presented its old attractions, and the loggerheads had long disappeared from the fire.
"I'll give you fifteen dollars, my friend, to take myself, my wife, and three children to the village." It was Samson Newell who spoke. "'M offered fifteen," cried the White Bear, pricking up his ears; "goin' to the tahvern at fifteen; who says fifteen 'n' arf?" "I do!" from a pursy passenger with a double chin and a heavy fob-chain.
"I never see him but two or three times," Miranda said. "I should like to have waited on him, and got a chance to look stiddy at him when he was eatin' his vittles. That 's the time to watch folks, when their jaws get a-goin' and their eyes are on what's afore 'em. Do you remember that chap the sheriff come and took away when we kep' tahvern? Eleven year ago it was, come nex' Thanksgivin' time.
Saymore, the tailor's wife, was not invited, because her husband mended clothes. If he had confined himself strictly to making them, it would have put a different face upon the matter. The landlord of the Mountain House and his lady were invited to Mrs. Sprowle's party. Not so the landlord of Pollard's Tahvern and his lady.
The Member of the Haouse inquired of me whether I could tell him if the Lamb Tahvern was kept well abaout these times. He knew that members from his place used to stop there, but he hadn't heerd much abaout it of late years. I had to inform him that that fold of rural innocence had long ceased offering its hospitalities to the legislative, flock.
There were two public-houses in the place: one dignified with the name of the Mountain House, somewhat frequented by city people in the summer months, large-fronted, three-storied, balconied, boasting a distinct ladies'-drawing-room, and spreading a table d'hote of some pretensions; the other, "Pollard's Tahvern," in the common speech, a two-story building, with a bar-room, once famous, where there was a great smell of hay and boots and pipes and all other bucolic-flavored elements, where games of checkers were played on the back of the bellows with red and white kernels of corn, or with beans and coffee, where a man slept in a box-settle at night, to wake up early passengers, where teamsters came in, with wooden-handled whips and coarse frocks, reinforcing the bucolic flavor of the atmosphere, and middle-aged male gossips, sometimes including the squire of the neighboring law-office, gathered to exchange a question or two about the news, and then fall into that solemn state of suspended animation which the temperance bar-rooms of modern days produce in human beings, as the Grotta del Cane does in dogs in the well-known experiments related by travellers.
This bar-room used to be famous for drinking and storytelling, and sometimes fighting, in old times. But the bar of Pollard's Tahvern no longer presented its old attractions, and the loggerheads had long disappeared from the fire.
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