Page:Carroll - Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.djvu/109

V] drinkit's good for the most of thembut 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 housethere'd hardly be a drunken man in the length and breadth of the land!"

And then I told her the old storyabout a certain cottager who bought himself a little barrel of beer, and installed his wife as