The kitchen of the Duck was full. A great fire of turf was heaped up, and glowed red, diffusing heat, but giving out no flame, and, notwithstanding the tobacco smoke, filling the place with its penetrating, peculiar odour. The men present—on this occasion they were all men—were drinking; they were mostly men of the class of agricultural labourer. Among them were two or three with dazed eyes, men silent, pallid, who looked at the speakers and acquiesced in every sentiment or opinion expressed, however contradictory they might be. These were opium-eaters. In the Fens, almost every cottage grows its crop of white poppy in the small garden. Of the poppy heads a tea is brewed. The mothers are accustomed to work in the fields, hoeing between the ranks of wheat. The rich soil that produces the corn produces also weeds that have to be kept under. That the babe may not interfere with the mother earning a small wage, it is given poppy tea, and that sends it to sleep for the day. But the drops of opium thus administered in infancy affect the tender brains, bewilder them, and subject the child to nervous pains. As it grows up to man or womanhood, it has recourse to the drug to which it was brought up in infancy. A large business in laudanum is done in the Fens, and much of the distraught mind and tortured nerve is due to this cause. The poppy tea dispels trouble as surely as whisky, and opium dulls pain at a cheaper and surer rate than the surgeon who boggles over its removal. 'I tell you,' said Pip Beamish, 'it is due to the farmers and yeomen. Look at them, up to the eyes in gold, and gold that is squeezed out of the fen by your hands. Till they have been taught a lesson, and that a sharp and stinging one, they will go on in the same way. No Acts of Parliament will help us. You may send up whom you will, Whig or Tory, to Westminster, it is the same. No party will do aught for you. No judges and no jury are of any avail, for law can't come in and right us. We must do that with our own hands. When a boy won't do the right thing, you put a stick across his back and make him; you don't ask for an Act of Parliament, you don't elect a member to teach him his duty. We must teach our farmers as you teach idle and thievish boys. Teach them in such a way as they won't forget. Teach them to fear the rod. Set the stackyards blazing throughout the Fens, and by the light of those fires they'll begin to see what is the way of justice and equity.' 'I don't see how that's going to lower the price of wheat,' said a ganger, named Silas Gotobed. 'You sez that the cost of bread is too high. If you burn the wheatstacks, there will be less corn, and up the price will go.' 'You're right there. That's reason, Silas,' said a third, Thomas Goat, a gaulter. 'The mischief don't lie with the farmers. They grow the corn—some one must do that. The wickedness is in the eaters.' 'Why, we're all eaters.'