At moments, however—they were only moments—female grace was at fault at the Wolverton refreshment rooms. The late Douglas Jerrold (father of one of the workman’s most real and truest friends—Blanchard by Christian name) had in his play of the “_Housekeeper_” one of the characters, a drunken wine-porter, who appears on the scene for only a few minutes, and all the language he gives utterance to is advice to his daughter and her companion, never to go anywhere without a cork-screw. No doubt this is good paternal advice, such as any good father of a family might give, but it is the use only of the instrument with which we are concerned. Wolverton had many stringent rules, and one of them was that “draught bitter” should not be “drunk on the premises”; pale ale, therefore, could only be furnished by means of the cork-screw. Now, we appeal to any father, husband, brother, cousin, or lover (the two latter often synonymous,—see all the dictionaries, classical and vulgate); Did you ever see a young lady draw, with grace, a cork out of a bottle in the old-fashioned way, that is, by placing it within the ample folds of her dress (all the more ample if crinoline were concealed behind it), and then tugging until the cork is extracted; if the cork be an easy, obedient, willing cork, the operation is not difficult, and woman’s want of grace is but for the moment, but it became momentous, to say nothing of bursting of tapes and wrenching of hooks and eyes, red face and perhaps disappointment, if main force must be resorted to. At all events, the late Mrs. Hibbert (known at Wolverton and elsewhere as Generalissima) appreciated the difficulty, and with woman’s tact transferred, by a wave of her sovereign sceptre, the beer bottle drawing department of the establishment to the hands of the young gentlemen with all the buttons, and thus released the young ladies from the duty. She never, however, could, to the day of her death, make up her mind that the young ladies ought to be relieved from ginger beer and soda water.