landlord, being pertickler-like. And if yer breaks em--"

"What would happen?" asked Paul, who was always very much impressed
by Barney Bill's detailed knowledge of the roads and the inns of
England.

Barney Bill shook his head. "It would break 'is 'eart. Them pots was
being used when William the Conqueror was a boy."

"Ten-sixty-six to ten-eighty-seven," said Paul the scholar. "They
mun be nine hundred years old."

"Not quite," said Barney Bill, with an air of scrupulous desire for
veracity. "But nearly. Lor' lumme!" he exclaimed, after a pause, "it
makes one think, doesn't it? One of them there quart mugs--suppose
it has been filled, say, ten times a day, every day for nine hundred
years--my Gosh! what a Pacific Ocean of beer must have been poured
from it! It makes one come over all of religious-like when one puts
it to one's head."

Paul did not reply, and reverential emotion kept Barney Bill silent
until they reached the clump of trees and the Little Bear Inn.

It was set back from the road, in a kind of dusty courtyard masked
off on one side by a gigantic elm and on the other by the fringe of
an orchard with ruddy apples hanging patiently beneath the foliage.
Close by the orchard stood the post bearing the signboard on which
the Little Bear, an engaging beast, was pictured, and presiding in a
ceremonious way over the horse-trough below. In the shade of the elm
stretched a trestle table and two wooden benches. The old inn,