Strand this afternoon, on his way home, the plague smote him. That is my sad news. I grieve to bring such news, for your cousin was a worthy gentleman and universally respected."

"Ah," Cynthia said very quietly, "so Pevensey is dead. But the plague kills quickly."

"Yes, yes, that is a comfort, certainly. Yes, he turned quite black in the face, they report, and before his men could reach him had fallen from his horse. It was all over almost instantly. I saw him afterward, hardly a pleasant sight. I came to you as soon as I could. I was vexatiously detained."

"So George Bulmer is dead in a London gutter! It seems strange, because he was here, befriended by monarchs, and very strong and handsome and selfconfident, hardly two hours ago. Is that his blood upon your sleeve?"

"But of course not. I told you I was vexatiously detained, almost at your gates. Yes, I had the ill luck to blunder into a disgusting business. The two rapscallions tumbled out of a doorway under my horse's very nose, egad! It was a near thing I did not ride them down. So I stopped, naturally. Afterward I regretted stopping, for I was too late to be of help. It was at the Golden Hind, of course. Something really ought to be done about that place. Yes, and that rogue Marler bled all over a new doublet, as you see. And the Deptford constables held me, with their foolish interrogatories-"

"So one of the fighting men was named Marlowe? Is he dead, too, dead in another gutter?"

"Marlowe or Marler, or something of the sort, wrote plays and sonnets and such stuff, they tell me. I do not know anything about him, though, I give you my word now, those greasy constables treated me as though I were a noted frequenter of pot-houses. That sort of thing is most annoying. At all events, he was drunk as David's sow, and squabbling over, saving your presence, a woman of the sort one looks to find in that hole. And so, as I was saying, this other rascal dug a knife into him."

But now, to Captain Musgrave's discomfort, Cynthia Allonby had begun to weep heartbrokenly.

So he cleared his throat, and he patted the back of her hand.

"It is a great shock to you, naturally, oh, most naturally, and does you infinite credit. But come now, Pevensey is gone, as we must all go some day, and our tears cannot bring him back, my dear. We can but hope he is better off, poor fellow, and look on it as a mysterious dispensation and that sort of thing, my dear."

"O Ned, but people are so cruel! People will be saying that it was I who kept poor Cousin George in London this past two weeks, and that but for me he would have been in France long ago! And then the queen, Ned! Why, that pig-headed old woman will be blaming it on me that there is nobody to prevent that detestable French King from turning Catholic and dragging England into new wars, and I shall not be able to go to any of the court dances! Nor to the masques," sobbed Cynthia, "nor anywhere!"

But

"Now you talk tender-hearted and angelic nonsense. It is noble of you to feel that way, of course; but Pevensey did not take proper care of himself, and that is all there is to it. Now, I have remained in London since the plague's outbreak. I stayed with my regiment, naturally. We have had a few deaths, of course; people die everywhere. the plague has never bothered me. And why has it never bothered me? Simply because I was sensible, took the pains to consult an astrologer, and by his advice wear about my neck night and day a bag of dried toad's blood and powdered cinnamon. It is an infallible specific for men born in February. No, not for a moment do I wish to speak harshly of the dead, but sensible persons cannot but consider Lord Pevensey's death to have been caused by his own carelessness."

"Now certainly that is true," the girl said, brightening. "It was really his own carelessness and his dear lovable rashness. And somebody could explain it to the queen. Besides, I often think that wars are good for the public spirit of a nation and bring out its true manhood. But, then, it upset me, too, a little, Ned, to hear about this Marlowe, for I must tell you that I knew the poor

man very slightly. So I happen to know that to-day he flung off in a rage, and began drinking, because somebody, almost by pure accident, had burned a packet of his verses."

Thereupon Captain Musgrave raised heavy eyebrows, and guffawed so heartily that the candle flickered.

"To think of the fellow's putting it on that plea, when he could so easily have written some more verses! That is the trouble with these poets, if you ask me; they are not practical even in their ordinary every-day lying. No, no, the truth of it was that the rogue wanted a pretext for making a beast of himself, and seized the first that came to hand. It is a daily practice with these poets. They hardly draw a sober breath. Everybody knows that."

Cynthia was looking at him in the half-lit room with very flattering admiration. Seen thus, with her scarlet lips a little parted, disclosing pearls, and with her naïve, dark eyes aglow, she was quite incredibly pretty and caressable. She had almost forgotten until now that this stalwart soldier, too, was in love with her. But now her spirits were rising venturously, and she knew that she liked Ned Musgrave. He had sensible notions; he saw things as they really were, and with him there would never be any nonsense about toplofty ideas. Then, too, her dear old white-haired father would be pleased, because there was a very fair estate. So Cynthia said:

"I believe you are right, Ned. I often wonder how they can be so lacking in self-respect. Oh, I am certain you must be right, for it is just what I felt without being able quite to express it. You will stay for supper with us, of course. Yes, but you must, because it is always a great comfort for me to talk with really sensible persons. I do not wonder that you are not very eager to stay, though, for I am probably a fright, with my eyes red, and with my hair all tumbling down, like an old witch's. Well, let us see what can be done about it, sir. There was a hand-mirror-"

And thus speaking, she tripped, with very much the reputed grace of a fairy, toward the far end of the room, and, standing a-tiptoe, groped at the obscure shelves, with a resultant crash of the falling china.

"Oh, but my lovely cups!" said Cynthia in dismay. "I have smashed both of them in looking for my mirror, sir, and trying to prettify myself for you. And I had so fancied them, because they had not their like in England, I have been told!"

She looked at the fragments and then at Musgrave, with wide, innocent, hurt eyes. She was honestly grieved by the loss of her quaint toys. But Musgrave, in his sturdy common-sense way, only laughed at her seriousness over such kickshaws.

"I am for an honest earthenware tankard myself," he said as the two went in to supper.

T

HE image of the prohibition-bred American youth (not this generation, but the next) straying through the wine-drenched and aledrenched pages of English literature captivates the fancy. The classics, to be sure, are equally bibulous; but with the classics the American youth has no concern. The advance guard of educators are busy clearing away the debris of Greek and Latin which has hitherto clogged his path. There is no danger of his learning from Homer that "Generous wine gives strength to toiling men," or from Socrates that "The potter's art begins with the wine jar," or from the ever-scandalous Horace that "Wine is mighty to inspire hope, and to drown the bitterness of care." The professor has conspired with the prohibitionist to save the undergraduate from such disedifying sentiments.

As for the Bible, where corn and oil and wine, the three fruits of a bountiful harvest, are represented as of equal virtue, it will probably be needful to supply such texts with explanatory and apologetic foot-notes. The sweet and sober counsel of Ecclesiastes: "Forsake not an old friend, for the new will not be like to him. A new friend is as new wine; it shall grow old, and thou shalt drink it with pleasure," has made its way into the heart of humanity, and has been embedded in the poetry of every land. But now, like the most lovely story of the marriage feast at Cana, it has been robbed of the simplicity of its appeal. I heard a sermon preached recently upon the marriage feast which ignored the miracle altogether. The preacher dwelt upon the dignity and responsibility of the mar

ried state, reprobated divorce, and urged parents to send their children to Sunday-school. It was a perfectly good sermon, filled with perfectly sound exhortations; but the speaker "strayed." Sunday-schools were not uppermost in the holy Mother's mind when she perceived and pitied the humiliation of her friends.

The banishing of the classics, the careful editing of the Scriptures, and the comprehensive ignorance of foreign languages and letters which distinguishes the young American, leaves only the field of British and domestic literature to enlighten or bewilder him.. Now, New England began to print books about the time that men grew restive as to the definition of temperance. Longfellow wrote a "Drinking Song" to water which achieved humor without aspiring to it, and Dr. Holmes wrote a teetotaler's adaptation of a drinking song which aspired to humor without achieving it. As a matter of fact, no drinking songs, not even the real ones and the good ones which sparkle in Scotch and English verse, have any illustrative value. They come under the head of special pleading, and are apt to be a bit defiant. In them, as in the temperance lecture, "that good sister of common life, the vine," becomes an exotic, desirable or reprehensible according to the point of view, but never simple and inevitable, like the olivetree and the sheaves of corn.

American letters, coming late in the day, are virgin of wine. There have been books, like Jack London's "John Barleycorn," written in the cause of temperance; there have been pleasant trifles, like Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Madeira Party," written to commemorate

certain dignified convivialities which even then were passing silently away; and there have been chance allusions, like Mr. Dooley's vindication of whisky from the charge of being food: "I wudden 't insult it be placin' it on the 'same low plain as a lobster salad;" and his loving recollection of his friend Schwartzmeister's cocktail, which was of such generous proportions that it "needed only a few noodles to look like a biled dinner." But it is safe to say that there is more drinking in "Pickwick Papers" than in a library of American novels. It is drinking without bravado, without reproach, without justification. For natural treatment of a debatable theme, Dickens stands unrivaled among novelists.

We are told that the importunate virtue of our neighbors, having broken one set of sympathies and understandings, will in time deprive us of meaner indulgences, such as tobacco, tea, and coffee. But tobacco, tea, and coffee, though friendly and compassionate to men, are late-comers and district-dwellers. They do not belong to the stately procession of the ages, like the wine which Noah and Alexander and Cæsar and Praxiteles and Plato and Lord Kitchener drank. When the Elgin marbles were set high over the Parthenon, when the Cathedral of Chartres grew into beauty, when "Hamlet" was first played at the Globe Theatre, men lived merrily and wisely without tobacco, tea, and coffee, but not without wine. Tobacco was given by the savage to the civilized world. It has an accidental quality which adds to its charm, but which promises consolation when those who are better than we want to be have taken it away from us. "I can understand," muses Dr. Mitchell, "the discovery of America, and the invention of printing; but what human want, what instinct, led up to tobacco? Imagine intuitive genius capturing this noble. idea from the odors of a prairie fire!" Charles Lamb pleaded that tobacco was at worst only a "white devil," but it was a persecuted little devil that for years suffered shameful indignities. We have Mr. Henry Adams's word for it that as late as 1862, Englishmen were not expected to smoke in the house.

They went out of doors or to the stables. Only a licensed libertine like Monckton Milnes permitted his guests to smoke in their rooms. Half a century later, Mr. Rupert Brooke, watching a designer in the advertising department of a New York store making "Matisse-like illustrations to some notes on summer suitings," was told by the superintendent that the firm gave a "free hand" to its artists, "except for nudes, improprieties, and figures of people smoking." To these last, some customers-even customers of the sex presumably interested in summer suitings "strongly objected."

The new school of English fiction which centers about the tea-table, and in which, as in the land of the lotuseaters, it is always afternoon, affords an arena for conversation and an easily procurable atmosphere. England is the second home of tea. She waited centuries, kettle on hob, and cat purring expectantly by the fire, for the coming of that sweet boon, and she welcomed it with the generous warmth of wisdom. No duties daunted her. No price was too high for her to pay. No risk was too great to keep her from smuggling the "China drink." No hearth was too humble to covet it, and the homeless brewed it by the roadside. Isopel Berners, that peerless and heroic tramp, paid ten shillings a pound for her tea; and when she lit her fire in the Dingle, comfort enveloped Lavengro, and he tasted the delights of domesticity.

But though England will doubtless fight like a lion for her tea, as for her cakes and ale, when bidden to purify herself of these indulgences, yet it is the ale, and not the tea, which has colored her masterful literature. There are phrases so inevitable that they defy monotony. Such are the "wine-dark sea" of Greece and the "nut-brown ale" of England. Even Lavengro, though he shared Isopel's tea, gave ale, "the true and proper drink of Englishmen," to the wandering tinker and his family. How else, he asks, could he have befriended these wretched folk? "There is a time for cold water [this is a generous admission on the writer's part], there is a time for strong meat, there is a time for advice, and there is a time

for ale; and I have generally found that the time for advice is after a cup of ale."

"Lavengro" has been called the epic of ale; but Borrow was no English rustic, content with the buxom charms of malt, and never glancing over her fat shoulder to wilder, gayer loves. He was an accomplished wanderer, at home with all men and with all liquor. He could order claret like a lord, to impress the supercilious waiter in a London inn. He could drink Madeira with the old gentleman who counseled the study of Arabic, and the sweet wine of Cypress with the Armenian who poured it from a silver flask into a silver cup, though there was nothing better to eat with it than dry bread. When, harried by the spirit of militant Protestantism, he peddled his Bibles through Spain, he dined with the courteous Spanish and Portuguese Gipsies, and found that while bread and cheese and olives comprised their food, there was always a leathern bottle of good white wine to give zest and spirit to the meal. He offered his brandy-flask to a Genoese sailor, who emptied it, choking horribly, at a draft, so as to leave no drop for a shivering Jew who stood by, hoping for a turn. Rather than see the Christian cavalier's spirits poured down a Jewish throat, explained the old boatman piously, he would have suffocated.

Englishmen drank malt liquor long before they tasted sack or canary. The ale-houses of the eighth century bear a respectable tradition of antiquity, until we remember that Egyptians were brewing barley beer five thousand years ago, and that Heroditus ascribes its invention to the ingenuity and benevolence of Isis. Thirteen hundred years before Christ, in the time of Seti I, an Egyptian gentleman complimented Isis by drinking so deeply of her brew that he forgot the seriousness of life, and we have to-day the record of his unseemly gaiety. Xenophon, with notable lack of enthusiasm, describes the barley beer of Armenia as a powerful beverage, "agreeable to those who were used to it," and adds that it was drunk out of a common vessel through hollow reeds, a commendable sanitary precaution.

In Thomas Hardy's story, "The Shepherd's Christening," there is a rare tribute paid to mead, that glorious intoxicant which our strong-headed, stout-hearted progenitors drank unscathed. The traditional "heather ale" of the Picts, the secret of which died with the race, was a glorified mead.

Fra' the bonny bells o' heather

They brewed a drink lang-syne, "T was sweeter far than honey,

"T was stronger far than wine.

The story goes that after the bloody victory of the Scots under Kenneth MacAlpine, in 860, only two Picts who knew the secret of the brew survived the general slaughter. Some say they were father and son, some say they were master and man. When they were offered their lives in exchange for the receipt, the older captive said he dared not reveal it while the younger lived, lest he be slain in revenge. So the Scots tossed the lad into the sea and waited expectantly. Then the last of the Picts cried, "I only know," and leaped into the ocean and was drowned. It is a brave tale. One wonders if a man would die to save the secret of making milk-toast.

From the pages of history the prohibition-bred youth may glean much offhand information about the wine which the wide world made and drank at every stage of civilization and decay. If, after the fashion of his kind, he eschews history, there are left to him encyclopedias, with their wealth of detail, and their paucity of intrinsic realities. Antiquarians also may be trusted to supply a certain number of papers on "leather drinking-vessels," and "toasts of the old Scottish gentry." But if the youth be one who browses untethered in the lush fields of English literature, taking prose and verse, fiction and fact, as he strays merrily along, what will he make of the hilarious company in which he finds himself? What of Falstaff, and the rascal Autolycus, and of Sir Toby Belch, who propounded the fatal query which has been answered in 1919? What of Herrick's "joy-sops," and "capring wine," and that simple and sincere "Thanksgiving hymn"