The Open Air 



himself up hedgehog fashion with some old sacks, 

 and immediately began to breathe heavily. He had 

 no difficulty in sleeping, first because his muscles 

 had been tried to the utmost, and next because his 

 skin was full to the brim, not of jolly " good ale and 

 old " but of the very smallest and poorest of wish- 

 washy beer. In his own words, it " blowed him up 

 till he very nigh bust." Now the great authorities 

 on dyspepsia, so eagerly studied by the wealthy folk 

 whose stomachs are deranged, tell us that a very 

 little flatulence will make the heart beat irregularly 

 and cause the most distressing symptoms. 



Roger had swallowed at least a gallon of a liquid 

 chemically designed, one might say, on purpose to 

 utterly upset the internal economy. Harvest beer 

 is probably the vilest drink in the world. The men 

 say it is made by pouring muddy water into empty 

 casks returned sour from use, and then brushing 

 them round and round inside with a besom. This 

 liquid leaves a stickiness on the tongue and a harsh 

 feeling at the back of the mouth which soon turns 

 to thirst, so that having once drunk a pint the drinker 

 must go on drinking. The peculiar dryness caused 

 by this beer is not like any other throat drought 

 worse than dust, or heat, or thirst from work; there 

 is no satisfying it. With it there go down the germs 

 of fermentation, a sour, yeasty, and, as it were, 

 secondary fermentation; not that kind which is 

 necessary to make beer, but the kind that unmakes 

 and spoils beer. It is beer rotting and decomposing 

 in the stomach. Violent diarrhoea often follows, and 

 then the exhaustion thus caused induces the men to 

 drink more in order to regain the strength necessary 

 to do their work. The great heat of the sun and the 

 heat of hard labour, the strain and perspiration, of 



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