Indeed, in the excitement of the moment, they were loud and extravagant in their commendations of "the mountain tap"; elevating it above every beverage produced from hops or
malt. It was a singular and fantastic scene; suited to a region where everything is strange and peculiar:--These groups of trappers, and hunters, and Indians, with their wild costumes, and wilder countenances; their boisterous gayety, and reckless air; quaffing, and making merry round these sparkling fountains; while beside them lay their weep ons, ready to be snatched up for instant service.
To say the truth, this behaviour of Partridge was a little inexcusable; but he had not slept off the effect of the dose which he swallowed the evening before; which had, in the morning, received the addition of above a pint of wine, or indeed rather of
malt spirits; for the perry was by no means pure.
Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour's talk with the iceman, reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of
malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into the flat across the air-shaft--that's about all there is to it.
No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the
malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.
I feel nice and clear again." He shook his head two or three times, he was rubbed down like a horse by the professional runner; he drank a mighty draught of
malt liquor; he recovered his good-humor as if by magic.
He wrote a pamphlet on
Malt on returning to England (for he was an ambitious man, and always liked to be before the public), and took a strong part in the Negro Emancipation question.
This was soon done, and he handed it over to Mr Codlin with that creamy froth upon the surface which is one of the happy circumstances attendant on mulled
malt.
The naked Saxon serf was drowning the sense of his half-year's hunger and thirst, in one day of gluttony and drunkenness the more pampered burgess and guild-brother was eating his morsel with gust, or curiously criticising the quantity of the
malt and the skill of the brewer.
"Or put it, my juvenile friends," said Chadband, stimulated by the sound, "that the unnatural parents of this slumbering heathen--for parents he had, my juvenile friends, beyond a doubt--after casting him forth to the wolves and the vultures, and the wild dogs and the young gazelles, and the serpents, went back to their dwellings and had their pipes, and their pots, and their flutings and their dancings, and their
malt liquors, and their butcher's meat and poultry, would THAT be Terewth?"
But, better far than fair home-brewed, or Yorkshire cake, or ham, or beef, or anything to eat or drink that earth or air or water can supply, there sat, presiding over all, the locksmith's rosy daughter, before whose dark eyes even beef grew insignificant, and
malt became as nothing.
The 'rahm' was a kind of lumber-hole smelling strong of
malt and grain; various sacks of which articles were piled around, leaving a wide, bare space in the middle.
But, there were no pigeons in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty, no
malt in the store-house, no smells of grains and beer in the copper or the vat.