This sidebar is from the vast amount of material that was not used in the script of "Marsh Fen and Town"
This piece from August 1876 may give some amusement as Spalding policemen assumed a man was drunk after he loaded his pipe with pieces of pork pie and started to smoke it!
A somewhat amusing case is reported this week, as occurring in the town a few days ago, which once more shows the difficulty experienced in deciding the question whether or not man is intoxicated. It appears that the police visited one the inns of Spalding, and found man asleep therein, and examining him, pronounced him he drunk. After some delay the landlord was found, who denied that the follow was intoxicated; and while the discussion was proceeding the subject thereof had become thoroughly awakened, and pulled out his pipe to have a smoke. Finding was short of 'bacca, and not being able remember where he had placed his own, or perhaps not having any, it did not occur to him that might order some in the house, but quietly and thoughtfully tilled his pipe with a portion of pork pie that he had taken in for the purpose of refreshment. Of course the police pointed this out evidence that the man was intoxicated; nor would they listen to the plea that the man was of forgetful temperament, or that he had returned from abroad with peculiar notions respecting the smoking habits of the English. They took the case, but the landlord, judiciously allowing little time to elapse, presented the man at the door of one of the magistrates, and, that gentleman being fond of psychological questions, once commenced “to study the case.” The supposed inebriate was put through a variety evolutions, and was made to wheel and march past curtain critical points; and, as succeeded in the task, was acquitted the imputation, and restored to his friend the publican, and the bosom of his family, without stain his character.”
Cannot some of our readers invent some new kind of pulsometer, by which man’s condition can known without all these varying formula;. The truly rural test fails in this age of School Boards and Education Act; the standing on a plank, elevating two buckets, is a poor guide now that our lower classes are taught the laws of attraction and gravitation—cannot some new plan be adopted, so that, by examining the state of the blood, or subjecting the party to processes under the new Vivisection Act, country justices may not be in the unpleasant predicament of trotting a man round their study scores of times before they are able to decide whether is or is not in a state of sobriety.
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