"If your thirst be as emphatic as your greeting, friend Heavy-fist,
it will certainly be a kindly deed to lead you to the drinking-place.
My shoulder tingles with your good-fellowship," he added, keeping two
arms'-lengths clear of me. "Do you wish," he said, "merely to cleanse
a dusty throat, or for blue or pink oblivion?"

"Why," I answered laughingly, "I have come a longish journey since
yesterday night--a journey out of count of all reasonable mileage--and
I might fairly plead a dusty throat as excuse for a beginning; but as
to the other things mentioned, those tinted forgetfulnesses, I do not
even know what you mean."

"Undoubtedly you are a stranger," said the friendly youth, eyeing me from
top to toe with renewed wonder, "and by your unknown garb one from afar."

"From how far no man can say--not even I--but from very far, in truth.
Let that stay your curiosity for the time. And now to bench and ale-mug,
on good fellow!--the shortest way. I was never so thirsty as this since
our water-butts went overboard when I sailed the southern seas as a
tramp apprentice, and for three days we had to damp our black tongues
with the puddles the night-dews left in the lift of our mainsail."

Without more words, being a little awed of me, I thought, the boy led
me through the good-humoured crowd to where, facing the main road to the
town, but a little sheltered by a thicket of trees covered with gigantic
pink blossoms, stood a drinking-place--a cluster of tables set round an
open grass-plot. Here he brought me a platter of some light inefficient
cakes which merely served to make hunger more self-conscious, and some
fine aromatic wine contained in a triple-bodied flask, each division
containing vintage of a separate hue. We broke our biscuits, sipped