He smiled, and said that he could not tell. "But surely, my friend," said I, "you can tell me what is ready?" "Even that I cannot do," he answered; "but I doubt not that the landlord can inform us." On this he rang the bell, and a fellow answered, to whom I put the same question. "What would you have?" he asked. I thought of the master, and I ordered a cold leg of pork to be washed down with tea and beer. "Did you say tea _and_ beer?" asked the landlord. "I did." "For twenty-five years have I been in business," said the landlord, "and never before have I been asked for tea and beer." "The gentleman is joking," said the man with the shining coat. "Or else----" said the elderly man in the corner. "Or what, sir?" I asked. "Nothing," said he--"nothing." There was something very strange in this man in the corner--him to whom I had spoken of Dafydd-ap-Gwilyn. "Then you are joking," said the landlord. I asked him if he had read the works of my master, George Borrow. He said that he had not. I told him that in those five volumes he would not, from cover to cover, find one trace of any sort of a joke. He would also find that my master drank tea and beer together. Now it happens that about tea I have read nothing either in the sagas or in the bardic cnylynions, but, whilst the landlord had departed to prepare my meal, I recited to the company those Icelandic stanzas which praise the beer of Gunnar, the long-haired son of Harold the Bear. Then, lest the language should be unknown to some of them, I recited my own translation, ending with the line-- "If the beer be small, then let the mug be large." I then asked the company whether they went to church or to chapel. The question surprised them, and especially the strange man in the corner, upon whom I now fixed my eye. I had read his secret, and as I looked at him he tried to shrink behind the clock-case. "The church or the chapel?" I asked him. "The church," he gasped. "_Which_ church?" I asked. He shrank farther behind the clock. "I have never been so questioned," he cried. I showed him that I knew his secret. "Rome was not built in a day," said I. "He! He!" he cried. Then, as I turned away, he put his head from behind the clock-case, and tapped his forehead with his fore-finger. So also did the man with the shiny coat, who stood before the empty fireplace. Having eaten the cold leg of pork--where is there a better dish, save only boiled mutton with capers?--and having drunk both the tea and the beer, I told the company that such a meal had been called "to box Harry" by the master, who had observed it to be in great favour with commercial gentlemen out of Liverpool. With this information and a stanza or two from Lopez de Vega I left the Inn of the Rose and Crown behind me, having first paid my reckoning. At the door the landlord asked me for my name and address. "And why?" I asked. "Lest there should be inquiry for you," said the landlord.