Then you shall take part in ancient ceremonies—wassailing, Church ales, bride ales, and the like; the merry sheep-shearers will sing for you, and for you the villagers shall dance round the ale-stake; then the old ballad-writers will lay before you their ballads praising ale, and headed with wood-cuts, humorous, but sometimes fearful to look upon. Having rested awhile in perusing these relics of the past, the doors of John Barleycorn’s greatest palaces will fly open before you, and while exploring these wonders of the present, you will chat pleasantly with {24} their founders, Dr. Johnson joining in with ponderous remarks on the brewery of his friend Thrale. The history of porter shall then be unfolded to you, after which you shall be introduced to the college butler, who is in the very act of compounding a noble wassail-bowl, and who, good man, whispers in your willing ear instructions for the making of a score or more of ale-cups; then the old Saxon leeches and their successors shall be summoned, and, in a language strange to modern ears, they shall relate how ale and certain herbs will cure all diseases; then shall you see a curious but not a wondrous sight—water passing through holes in teetotal arguments; and lastly the great French savant shall take you into his laboratory, and shall make you see in a grain of yeast a world of wonders. Last of all we beg you to treasure up in your memory these old lines:— He that buys land buys many stones, He that buys flesh buys many bones, He that buys eggs buys many shells, _But he that buys good ale buys nothing else_. [Illustration] {25} [Illustration] CHAPTER II. “What hath been and now is used by the English, as well since the Conquest, as in the days of the Britons, Saxons and Danes.”—_Drinke and Welcome.—Taylor._ “Not of an age, but for all time.”—_Ben Jonson._ _ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF ALE AND BEER_ We must go back several thousand years into the past to trace the origin of our modern ale and beer. The ancient Egyptians, as we learn from the _Book of the Dead_, a treatise at least 5,000 years old, understood the manufacture of an intoxicating liquor from grain. This liquor they called _hek_, and under the slightly modified form _hemki_ the name has been used in Egypt for beer until comparatively modern times. An ancient Egyptian medical manual, of about the same date as the _Book of the Dead_, contains frequent mention of the use of Egyptian beer in medicine, and at a period about 1,000 years later, the papyri afford conclusive evidence of the existence even in that early age, of a burning liquor question in Egypt, for it is recorded that intoxication had become so common that many of the beer shops had to be suppressed.