and very little sense to catch hold of in the middle. One man would crone
the air, and the others would crone a solemn chorus, but there was little
hard drinking, for Elzevir Block never got drunk himself, and did not
like his guests to get drunk either. On singing nights the room grew hot,
and the steam stood so thick on the glass inside that one could not see
in; but at other times, when there was no company, I have peeped through
the red curtains and watched Elzevir Block and Ratsey playing backgammon
at the trestle-table by the fire. It was on the trestle-table that Block
had afterwards laid out his son's dead body, and some said they had
looked through the window at night and seen the father trying to wash the
blood-matting out of the boy's yellow hair, and heard him groaning and
talking to the lifeless clay as if it could understand. Anyhow, there had
been little drinking in the inn since that time, for Block grew more and
more silent and morose. He had never courted customers, and now he
scowled on any that came, so that men looked on the Why Not? as a
blighted spot, and went to drink at the Three Choughs at Ringstave.

My heart was in my mouth when Ratsey lifted the latch and led me into the
inn parlour. It was a low sanded room with no light except a fire of
seawood on the hearth, burning clear and lambent with blue salt flames.
There were tables at each end of the room, and wooden-seated chairs round
the walls, and at the trestle table by the chimney sat Elzevir Block
smoking a long pipe and looking at the fire. He was a man of fifty, with
a shock of grizzled hair, a broad but not unkindly face of regular
features, bushy eyebrows, and the finest forehead that I ever saw. His
frame was thick-set, and still immensely strong; indeed, the countryside
was full of tales of his strange prowess or endurance. Blocks had been
landlords at the Why Not? father and son for years, but Elzevir's mother
came from the Low Countries, and that was how he got his outland name and
could speak Dutch. Few men knew much of him, and folks often wondered how