Having bought his tobacco and observed the life and thought of the town for half an hour - it was market day and the normal stagnation of the place was temporarily relieved and brightened by pigs that eluded their keeper and a bull calf which caught a stout farmer at the psychological moment when he was tying his shoelace and lifted him six feet - he made his way to the Emsworth Arms, the most respectable of the eleven inns which the citizens of Market Blandings contrived in some miraculous way to support. In most English country towns, if the public houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the innkeepers blaming the Government.
(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
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