This bar-room used to be famous for
drinking and storytelling, and sometimes fighting, in old times. That was
when there were rows of decanters on the shelf behind the bar, and a
hissing vessel of hot water ready, to make punch, and three or four
loggerheads (long irons clubbed at the end) were always lying in the fire
in the cold season, waiting to be plunged into sputtering and foaming
mugs of flip,--a goodly compound; speaking according to the flesh, made
with beer and sugar, and a certain suspicion of strong waters, over which
a little nutmeg being grated, and in it the hot iron being then allowed
to sizzle, there results a peculiar singed aroma, which the wise regard
as a warning to remove themselves at once out of the reach of temptation.
But the bar of Pollard's Tahvern no longer presented its old attractions,
and the loggerheads had long disappeared from the fire. In place of the
decanters, were boxes containing "lozengers," as they were commonly
called, sticks of candy in jars, cigars in tumblers, a few lemons, grown
hard-skinned and marvellously shrunken by long exposure, but still feebly
suggestive of possible lemonade,--the whole ornamented by festoons of
yellow and blue cut flypaper.
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