the table. This had been pushed so closely into the chimney-corner,
to give all available room to the dancers, that its inner edge
grazed the elbow of the man who had ensconced himself by the fire,
and thus the two strangers were brought into close companionship.
They nodded to each other way of breaking the ice of unacquaintance,
and the first stranger handed his neighbour the large mug--a
huge vessel of brown ware, having its upper edge worn away, like
a threshold, by the rub of whole genealogies of thirsty lips that
had gone the way of all flesh, and bearing the following inscription
burned upon its rotund side in yellow letters:

THERE IS NO FUN UNTILL I CUM.

The other man, nothing loath, raised the mug to his lips, and drank
on and on and on, till a curious blueness overspread the countenance
of the shepherd's wife, who had regarded with no little surprise
the first stranger's free offer to the second of what did not belong
to him to dispense.

"I knew it!" said the toper to the shepherd, with much satisfaction.
"When I walked up your garden afore coming in, and saw the hives
all of a row, I said to myself, 'Where there's bees there's honey,
and where there's honey there's mead.' But mead of such a truly
comfortable sort as this I really didn't expect to meet in my
older days." He took yet another pull at the mug, till it assumed
an ominous horizontality.

"Glad you enjoy it!" said the shepherd, warmly.

"It is goodish mead," assented Mrs. Fennel, with an absence of