The Flying Inn

“But you exaggerate, you know,” went on Pump, polishing his gun, “about the crescent on St. Paul’s. It wasn’t exactly that. What Dr. Moole suggested, I think, was some sort of double emblem, you know, combining cross and crescent.”

“And carled the Crescent,” muttered Dalroy.

“And you can’t call Dr. Moole a parson either,” went on Mr. Humphrey Pump, polishing industriously. “Why, they say he’s a sort of atheist, or what they call an agnostic, like Squire Brunton who used to bite elm trees by Marley. The grand folks have these fashions, Captain, but they’ve never lasted long that I know of.”

“I think it’s serious this time,” said his friend, shaking his big red head. “This is the last i

“I know,” assented the i

“I passed there just now; and it has been destroyed,” said Dalroy.

“Destroyed by fire?” asked Pump, pausing in his gun-scrubbing.

“No,” said Dalroy, “destroyed by lemonade. They’ve taken away its license or whatever you call it. I made a song about it, which I’ll sing to you now!” And with an astounding air of suddenly revived spirits, he roared in a voice like thunder the following verses, to a simple but spirited tune of his own invention:

“Hullo!” cried Pump, with another low whistle. “Why here comes his lordship. And I suppose that young man in the goggles is a Committee or something.”

“Let him come,” said Dalroy, and continued in a yet more earthquake bellow:

As the last echo of this lyrical roar rolled away among the apple-trees, and down the steep, white road into the woods, Captain Dalroy leaned back in his chair and nodded good humouredly to Lord Ivywood, who was standing on the lawn with his usual cold air, but with slightly compressed lips. Behind him was a dark young man with double eyeglasses and a number of printed papers in his hand; presumably J. Leveson, Secretary. In the road outside stood a group of three which struck Pump as strangely incongruous, like a group in a three act farce. The first was a police inspector in uniform; the second was a workman in a leather apron, more or less like a carpenter, and the third was an old man in a scarlet Turkish fez, but otherwise dressed in very fashionable English clothes in which he did not seem very comfortable. He was explaining something about the i

“Fine song that, my lord,” said Dalroy, with cheerful egotism. “I’ll sing you another,” and he cleared his throat.

“Mr. Pump,” said Lord Ivywood, in his bell-like and beautiful voice, “I thought I would come in person, if only to make it clear that every indulgence has been shown you. The mere date of this i

“Ah, my lord,” broke in Pump with a sigh, “I’d rather deal with your great grandfather, I would, though he married a hundred negresses instead of one, than see a gentleman of your family taking away a poor man’s livelihood.”

“The act is specially designed in the interests of the relief of poverty,” proceeded Lord Ivywood, in an unruffled ma

“It is here fully explained,” said Lord Ivywood, putting on his elderly eyeglasses, “that the purpose of the Act is largely to protect the savings of the more humble and necessitous classes. I find in paragraph three, ‘we strongly advise that the deleterious element of alcohol be made illegal save in such few places as the Government may specially exempt for Parliamentary or other public reasons, and that the provocative and demoralising display on i

Captain Dalroy had been studying Ivywood with a very bright blue eye; and he spoke now much more quietly than he generally did.

“Excuse me one moment, my lord,” he said. “But there was one point in your important explanation which I am not sure I have got right. Do I understand you to say that, though sign-boards are to be generally abolished, yet where, if anywhere, they are retained, the right to sell fermented liquor will be retained also? In other words, though an Englishman may at last find only one i

Lord Ivywood had an admirable command of temper, which had helped him much in his career as a statesman. He did not waste time in wrangling about the Captain’s locus standi in the matter. He replied quite simply,

“Yes, Your statement of the facts is correct.”

“Whenever I find an i

“If you find any such, yes,” answered Ivywood, quite temperately. “But we hope soon to have removed them altogether.”

Captain Patrick Dalroy rose enormously from his seat with a sort of stretch and yawn.

“Well, Hump,” he said to his friend, “the best thing, it seems to me, is to take the important things with us.”

With two sight-staggering kicks he sent the keg of rum and the round cheese flying over the fence, in such a direction that they bounded on the descending road and rolled more and more rapidly down toward the dark woods into which the path disappeared. Then he gripped the pole of the i