Bishop Still's old air. 'Tis said he sleeps in
a beer-barrel, and washes himself in the
morning by turning the tap of a full cask of
Burton ale over his face and hands: but that
is no business of mine.

"Burton-on-Trent," Sir John vouchsafed
to tell me, whiling away the time, as we rolled
along the London and North-Western Railway,
Birmingham-ward, "has been celebrated
for beer and breweries for many hundred
years. Old Doctor Plot, in his Staffordshire
Natural History, mentions the celebrity of
Burton-on-Trent for malting. The great
Parliamentary general, my Lord Essex (a
worthy nobleman, but on the wrong side),
writing in sixteen hundred and forty-four on
the subject of a garrison to be placed in
Burton, says, that the inhabitants were
"chiefly clothiers and maltsters." Sir Walter
Scott alludes to Burton and its brewers in
Ivanhoe. Sir Oswald Mosely, in his History
of Tutbury Castle, tells us that the intelligence
of the Babington conspiracy was conveyed to
Queen Mary Stuart, while a prisoner in
Tutbury Castle, by a brewer at Burton.
Who knows but that the Scots Queen may
have been kept in knowledge of the progress
of the plot for her deliverance by treasonable
documents wrapped round the bungs of the
ale-casks? Doctor Shaw adverts to the Burton
breweries as famous and flourishing in seventeen
hundred and twenty: and the records
of our house show that the founder of that
branch thereof, now managed by two well-
known firms, was in extensive commercial
communication with Russia, Poland, and the
Danubian provinces—all great consumers of
the sweet strong ale of Burton—early in the
reign of George the Second. Yet, in
England," resumed Sir John, taking breath, and
murmuring something against confounded
railways and in favour of a cool tankard,
"the celebrity of the Burton beers was almost
purely local till within late years. The
Burton Barleycorns sent but little of their
wares to London. The Peacock in Gray's Inn
Lane is mentioned by Doctor Shaw (seventeen
hundred and thirty-eight) as the first Burton-
ale house. To be sure, there were in those
days only packhorse roads to London. There
are people alive now in Burton who can
remember to have heard their mothers tell
of the first construction of the roads to the
neighbouring towns."

Swiftly the rapid steam-serpent bore us
towards the home of beer; and my travelling
companion told me long stories of the herculean
labours of the brewers, whom he liked to
consider as the Barleycorn intendants or
stewards; how one of them and the Russian
ministry fell in and fell out; and how he
put his trust in princes, and was deceived
accordingly.

"But respecting pale ale," I asked—"pale
ale—bitter ale. The delight and solace of
the Indian subaltern in his fuming bungalow;
the worthy rival of brandy pawnee; the
drink without which no tiffin can be
complete, no journey by dawk possible: the
favourite drink here in England of lord and
bagman, duchess and nurse; the much
admired tonic for invalids and persons of weak
interiors ?"

"I'll tell you. While in London in eighteen
hundred and twenty-two, one of my brewers
was dining with an East Indian director, and
was talking with some despondency of his
trade anxieties:—

"' Why don't you try the India Trade? '
asked the director.

"'Don't know of it.'

"'Leave the cold countries: try the hot.
Why not brew India beer?' The director
rang the bell, and ordered his butler to bring
a bottle of India Ale which had been to India
and back. Sir John Barleycorn's representative
tasted it. Went home. The director
sent him a dozen of the beer by coach. The
brewer took counsel with his head brewer, a
practical hard-headed man, the hereditary
maltster of the firm. They held a solemn
council with locked doors, and the result
was that the first mash of the East India
Pale Ale, of which more than ten thousand
hogsheads are now shipped off annually to the
three presidencies, was brewed in a tea-pot.

"There, sir," concluded Sir John. "That's
the true legend of pale ale. Not so interesting
perchance as the tradition concerning the
discovery of roast pig in China, the invention
of grog, or the first preparation of pickled
herrings by the Dutch. There is nothing
new under the sun, and there can be no doubt
that bitter ale was well known to the ancient
Hebrews, as the editor of Notes and Queries
will tell you. But here's Tamworth."

We traversed a yard as thickly strewed
with empty barrels as Woolwich dockyard is
with empty cannons; but a peaceful arsenal
—a field of drink and not of death. There
were lounging or working about the yard
sundry big draymen, selected, as draymen
should be, for their size and strength;
all possessing a curious family resemblance
to their cousins-german the Barclay and
Perkins, and Truman and Hanbury men in
London. They were backing horses, and
performing curious feats with drays, and
toppling full casks about like gigantic ninepins,
with such ease and such grave and immoveable
countenances that I could not help thinking
of the goblin players for whom Rip Van
Winkle set up the pins that very long night
on the Catskill Mountains; or of those other
players whose skittle-ground was on the
Hartz in Germany, and who had Frederic
Barbarossa for their president. We mounted
a steep flight of stairs, into a large apartment
and watched the sacks of malt being
slowly hoisted up by a crane through the
window.

The malt is first weighed, then sifted in a
hopper with a double screen; then, being
precipitated up a curious contrivance called a