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‘Make yourself at home, master,’ said the shepherd, perhaps a trifle less heartily than on the first occasion. Not that Fennel had the least tinge of niggardliness in his composition; but the room was far from large, spare chairs were not numerous, and damp companions were not altogether desirable at close quarters for the women and girls in their bright-coloured gowns.

However, the second comer, after taking off his greatcoat, and hanging his hat on a nail in one of the ceiling-beams as if he had been specially invited to put it there, advanced and sat down at the table. This had been pushed so closely into the chimney-corner, to give all available room to the dancers, that its inner edge grazed the elbow of the man who had ensconced himself by the fire; and thus the two strangers were brought into close companionship. They nodded to each other by way of breaking the ice of unacquaintance, and the first stranger handed his neighbour the family mug–a huge vessel of brown ware, having its upper edge worn away like a threshold by the rub of whole generations of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all flesh, and bearing the following inscription burnt upon its rotund side in yellow letters

THERE IS NO FUN
UNTiL i CUM.

The other man, nothing loth, raised the mug to his lips, and drank on, and on, and on–till a curious blueness overspread the countenance of the shepherd’s wife, who had regarded with no little surprise the first stranger’s free offer to the second of what did not belong to him to dispense.

‘I knew it!’ said the toper to the shepherd with much satisfaction. ‘When I walked up your garden before coming in, and saw the hives all of a row, I said to myself; “Where there’s bees there’s honey, and where there’s honey there’s mead.” But mead of such a truly comfortable sort as this I really didn’t expect to meet in my older days.’ He took yet another pull at the mug, till it assumed an ominous elevation.

‘Glad you enjoy it!’ said the shepherd warmly.

‘It is goodish mead,’ assented Mrs. Fennel, with an absence of enthusiasm which seemed to say that it was possible to buy praise for one’s cellar at too heavy a price. ‘It is trouble enough to make–and really I hardly think we shall make any more. For honey sells well, and we ourselves can make shift with a drop o’ small mead and metheglin for common use from the comb-washings.”

‘O, but you’ll never have the heart!’ reproachfully cried the stranger in cinder-gray, after taking up the mug a third time and setting it down empty. ‘I love mead, when ’tis old like this, as I love to go to church o’ Sundays, or to relieve the needy any day of the week.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ said the man in the chimney-corner, who, in spite of the taciturnity induced by the pipe of tobacco, could not or would not refrain from this slight testimony to his comrade’s humour.

Now the old mead of those days, brewed of the purest first-year or maiden honey, four pounds to the gallon–with its due complement of white of eggs, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace, rosemary, yeast, and processes of working, bottling, and cellaring–tasted remarkably strong; but it did not taste so strong as it actually was. Hence, presently, the stranger in cinder-gray at the table, moved by its creeping influence, unbuttoned his waistcoat, threw himself back in his chair, spread his legs, and made his presence felt in various ways.

‘Well, well, as I say,’ he resumed, ‘I am going to Casterbridge, and to Casterbridge I must go. I should have been almost there by this time; but the rain drove me into your dwelling, and I’m not sorry for it.’

‘You don’t live in Casterbridge?’ said the shepherd.

‘Not as yet; though I shortly mean to move there.’

‘Going to set up in trade, perhaps?’

‘No, no,’ said the shepherd’s wife. ‘It is easy to see that the gentleman is rich, and don’t want to work at anything.’

The cinder-gray stranger paused, as if to consider whether he would accept that definition of himself. He presently rejected it by answering, ‘Rich is not quite the word for me, dame. I do work, and I must work. And even if I only get to Casterbridge by midnight I must begin work there at eight to-morrow morning. Yes, het or wet, blow or snow, famine or sword, my day’s work to-morrow must be done.’