Every household, however poor, managed to raise a "feast-cake"
and a bottle of ginger or raisin wine, which stood on the cottage table
ready for all comers, and not unlikely to make them remember feast-time,
for feast-cake is very solid, and full of huge raisins. Moreover,
feast-time was the day of reconciliation for the parish. If Job Higgins
and Noah Freeman hadn't spoken for the last six months, their "old
women" would be sure to get it patched up by that day. And though there
was a good deal of drinking and low vice in the booths of an evening,
it was pretty well confined to those who would have been doing the like,
"veast or no veast;" and on the whole, the effect was humanising and
Christian. In fact, the only reason why this is not the case still is
that gentlefolk and farmers have taken to other amusements, and have, as
usual, forgotten the poor. They don't attend the feasts themselves, and
call them disreputable; whereupon the steadiest of the poor leave them
also, and they become what they are called. Class amusements, be
they for dukes or ploughboys, always become nuisances and curses to a
country. The true charm of cricket and hunting is that they are still
more or less sociable and universal; there's a place for every man who
will come and take his part.
No one in the village enjoyed the approach of "veast day" more than Tom,
in the year in which he was taken under old Benjy's tutelage.
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