I plead guilty to having no taste for the east-country ale not even for is Howell's best which had stood in its eighty gallon cask since last October It was hard strong and just in that state of acid fermentation that muddles the drinker's brain But In approval of its constant companion the harvest was unqualified

This is a variety of the bun tribe which to my taste beats the famous bath bun hollow round plump and baked to just the most tempting shade of brown. A warm spicy scent filled the house whenever these buns were fresh from the oven which was pretty often for the bountiful old custom, now mostly disused, of giving the reapers fourses cake and ale was kept up at the Grundel, and every afternoon at a quarter to four the donkey cart set sail from the kitchen door to the harvest field with its stone beer bottles and buns piled up on a white cloth. I will have nothing to say respecting the opinion of an antiquarian friend that the pagan ancestry of the fourses cake was offered up to Ceres; the bare notion of such remote antiquity would in my fancy give them a smack of mustiness, but oh my reader, curious in old manuscripts have you never come across a picture with the harvestfield to the left and on the right an interior with the Saxon housewife busy over her batch of buns as like those of the present day as monkish skill could draw them.