The Special Tax Stamp on the Wall: Liquor Dealer Licenses and the 1863 Revenue Rules in Small-Town New Hampshire
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains the federal liquor licenses created by the Internal Revenue Act of 1862 and amended in 1863. He covers the yearly fees, the three-gallon line between retail and wholesale, and why a Pittsfield shopkeeper in a dry state thought twice before nailing a federal liquor license on his wall. He also tells how his own license hung next to Barnaby's window, which cost a nosy assistant assessor the seat of his trousers. Wilkesboro runner Junior Vance adds new stories about federal tax stamps in dry North Carolina counties, and Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's call about hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg before knocking down the blue-flame test.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle your carcass down, you great black sack of grievances. You sound like a deacon trying to pass a peach pit. There is no revenue man at the window tonight. There is only the moon, and the moon pays no taxes either, and nobody sends a collector after it. Lie down.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, a heavy body thumps down against the logs
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling, then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: puller of teeth, beater of iron, stamper of coppers, inventor of contraptions, and twice the overnight guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, who keeps a cot ready for me the way a good innkeeper keeps a regular's mug on the peg.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is a scrap of paper. It isn't a bank note and it isn't a love letter. It's the federal liquor license, the yearly receipt Washington wants hanging on your wall where any inspector with a squint and a pencil can read it. We'll talk about who in Pittsfield bought one, who wouldn't touch one with a hay fork, what a man got for doing business without one, and how that paper hung on my own wall, which is a story with a bear in it and a bare backside in it, and I don't mean the bear's.
Wilkins: But first, by solemn obligation, I tell you that making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is history and education. I say it as a man who has had it explained to him by two sheriffs, one magistrate, and a judge with gout who shouted it at me from a chair with his foot in a bucket.
♦ Wax crackle, a short brass-bell chime
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♪ Fiddle sting, fades
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifting in the stove
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The License and the Law of 1862.
Wilkins: In the summer of 1862 the Union was losing money faster than a stuck hog loses blood, and Congress went looking for a vein. On the first of July Mr. Lincoln signed the Internal Revenue Act, and it was the largest net Washington ever threw over the American shopkeeper. It taxed whiskey, and you've heard me curse that tax before, so I'll spare you the encore. Tonight I mean the other half of the trap, the license.
Wilkins: Under that Act a man couldn't simply open shop in certain trades. He had to buy a yearly federal license first. Lawyers needed one. Auctioneers needed one. Billiard-hall keepers, peddlers, brokers, and horse dealers all needed one, and a horse dealer is a man who ought to need two. The liquor trade got carved up finest of all, the way a butcher carves a hog he means to sell by the ounce.
Wilkins: A retail liquor dealer paid twenty dollars a year. A wholesale liquor dealer paid a hundred. A rectifier, the fellow who takes raw spirit and runs it again or doctors it with flavors, also paid a hundred. Distillers had a license of their own. Brewers had theirs. Hotels, inns, and eating houses each had a separate one. The apothecary paid ten dollars, and that ten dollars did not let him sell a single drop of liquor except as medicine. And what decided whether you were retail or wholesale? A jug. Under three gallons at one time, you were retail. Over it, you were wholesale.
♦ A jug is set down hard on a plank counter
Wilkins: Then in March of 1863 Congress went back in and patched the thing, because it leaked like a cheap worm. They tightened the language, fiddled with the rates, and sent their assessors out into every valley in the Union with ledgers and the cheerful manners of a man come to collect on a funeral. And I hear the gentlemen in Washington mean to quit calling it a license altogether and call it a special tax, so it sounds less like permission and more like robbery, which is at least honest.
Wilkins: Now, the paper. The license was made out to a man and a place. It named your trade and your premises, and the collector's men wanted it on display, posted where the assistant assessor could walk in, look up, and see your name, your trade, and your twenty dollars staring back at him. Picture it hanging over the cracker barrel among the almanacs and the flypaper: the Federal Government of the United States, in a frame.
Wilkins: And here's the rub that made every Pittsfield storekeeper chew his whiskers. New Hampshire has been a dry state on paper since 1855. By state law, each town appoints a liquor agent who may sell spirits for medicinal, mechanical, and sacramental purposes and nothing else. That means a man who buys a federal retail liquor license in Pittsfield is paying Washington twenty dollars for the privilege of doing what Concord says he may not do. The federal paper says plainly that it grants no permission under state law. Washington takes your money and gives you no protection at all, the way my uncle Ezra treated his marriage.
Wilkins: So a liquor license on a wall in a dry state is like a man nailing up his own wanted poster beside the door to save the sheriff the trouble. A federal license guarantees a man two things: Washington knows where he lives, and so does every sheriff who can read.
♪ Low banjo vamp, brief
♦ Wax crackle, chain clinks once outside
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Who Hung the Paper in Pittsfield, and Who Hung the Assessor.
Wilkins: Let me walk you down the turnpike in the summer of '63. The mills on the Suncook are running hot on war cloth, the river is low and brown, and the dust on Main Street is fine enough to powder a corpse. The assistant assessor for our division comes up from Concord in a hired buggy with a ledger the size of a church door, and he goes shop to shop.
Wilkins: First comes the town liquor agent, a dried-apple man with spectacles who would bless his own breakfast twice if he thought it would pass inspection. He bought his federal license promptly, paid in clean notes, and hung it square and level, because he was the one man in town with a state paper saying he was allowed. He had a little cabinet of jars marked 'medicinal' and a ledger of who bought what for which complaint. You've never seen so much rheumatism in one town. By that ledger every man in Pittsfield had a bad back, two bad knees, and a sick aunt in Barnstead.
Wilkins: Then the hotel keeper by the depot road. He bought the hotel license and swore up and down he served nothing stronger than switchel. His front porch smelled like a Saint Patrick's wake in a rum cask, and the assessor wrote 'switchel' in the ledger with a face like a man swallowing a bee.
Wilkins: Then the general store, and that's where the war broke out. I don't mean the war down South. I mean a war with a cracker barrel for a breastwork.
♦ Store bell jangles, a creaking floor, a crowd murmuring
Wilkins: The proprietor, whom I'll call Hosea, since that was nearly his name and he's dead and can't sue me, sold molasses, nails, calico, tobacco, and cider. Every man in the valley sells cider, and when cider sits by the woodstove from Thanksgiving to Candlemas it does what God and yeast intend. Hosea had never bought a liquor license and didn't mean to start, because, he said, 'I sell no liquor. I sell apples that have had an experience.'
Wilkins: The assessor asked him how he sold it. Hosea said by the jug. 'What size jug?' Three gallons. 'Exactly three?' Thereabouts. Well, the law says under three gallons at a time is retail and over is wholesale, so Hosea's whole fortune in the eyes of Washington came down to whether that jug ran a cup over or a cup short.
Wilkins: Old Deacon Pettengill was sitting on the nail keg, as he did from eight in the morning until his wife came for him with a broom, and he said the jug was half full when it left the store, so it was only a gallon and a half, retail, twenty dollars. Hosea said if it was half empty then it was empty, and nobody pays tax on an empty jug. The blacksmith's boy said the jug ought to count as wholesale on account of its belly, and that his own mother counted as wholesale on account of hers. He got a cuff on the ear from his father for that, then another from the deacon for laughing, then a third from Hosea for spitting on the stove.
Wilkins: A drover from Gilmanton said a man who drinks his cider on the store steps has drunk it on the premises, and that's a tavern, and Hosea needed a hotel license as well. Hosea said the steps belonged to the town, not the store. The drover said the town had no license either. And the assessor stood in the middle of it all with his pencil up like a drowning man's hand. Three gallons is wholesale and two gallons and three quarts is retail, so in this republic the whole difference between a merchant and a scoundrel is about one good swallow.
♦ A chair scrapes, a jug clunks, laughter
Wilkins: In the end Hosea switched to two-gallon jugs, sold them in pairs, and swore on his mother's grave they were two separate sales made to the same man in quick succession. His mother was alive, sitting in the back room shelling peas, and she didn't care for the oath.
Wilkins: Now, the fines. A man caught carrying on a licensed trade without his license still owed the license money, and on top of it he faced a penalty on conviction that could climb into the hundreds of dollars, plus a cell for the stubborn. For a hill farmer that's a year of potatoes, a cow, and his dignity. Most men in this valley would sooner pay a doctor than a fine, and I know, because I'm the doctor, and I charge less.
Wilkins: And what about Fort Wilkins? What did I hang on my wall? I'll tell you plainly. I bought a license. I bought the apothecary license, ten dollars, because I am a medical man and every spirit I sell is medicine, either for the patient or for me after the patient leaves. I paid the collector in coin, twenty dollars' worth of large coppers, every one of them freshly stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. He sat on my bench counting by lamplight until midnight, cursing and licking his thumb, and his horse walked home bowlegged under the sack.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing off the anvil
Wilkins: Then I framed that license in hammered copper, very handsome, with rivet heads all around like a ship's porthole, and hung it exactly where the law wanted it: in plain view, beside the log window. The law said in plain view. It didn't say whose view. Outside that window, on twelve feet of chain, sleeps Barnaby. If you wish to read my license from the dooryard, you must lean in over the sill. And if you lean over that sill, you are presenting the whole south end of yourself to four hundred pounds of bear.
♦ Barnaby grunts low, chain shifts
Wilkins: Which brings us to the assistant assessor who came that October. I'll call him Mr. Crump, because that's the sound he made later. He was a narrow man with a waxed mustache and a coat cut so tight behind that it looked painted on. He wouldn't come through the door like a Christian. He wanted to inspect the license from outside, through the window, as was his right, he said, so he could see whether I'd hung it 'conspicuously.' I said, 'Mr. Crump, it is very conspicuous from where you're standing, and so are you.'
Wilkins: He leaned in. He squinted. The fine print on those papers is small, the date was smudged, and he leaned in further, his boots up off the ground and his belly on the sill, that tight coat stretched across his hindquarters like a drumhead. Barnaby had been asleep. Barnaby wasn't asleep any longer.
♦ A wet snuffle, a heavy body rising, chain paying out with a long rattle
Wilkins: I heard it before I saw it, a sound like a wet sail tearing in a gale, all at once. Barnaby took the coat tails in one bite, and the trousers went with them, and the drawers went with the trousers, the whole lot peeled off that federal officer like the skin off a boiled potato. Mr. Crump stood there in the dooryard with his front half in my parlor and his back half shining at the Suncook Valley, white as a plate of lard and a good deal less firm. Then Barnaby gave him a single swipe, a friendly one by bear measure, and laid four red furrows across the left cheek of his behind as neat as if I'd plowed them for spring peas.
Wilkins: Did he scream? Neighbors, the cows in Barnstead stopped giving milk. He came through that window into my parlor headfirst, bleeding and blaspheming in a fine Concord accent. I laid him face down on my operating chair, the same chair where I pull molars, and stitched his backside with the dental silk I use on a gum after a tooth comes out. Eleven stitches. He bit a leather strap the whole time and wept into my spittoon. It was the first time a federal officer ever left Fort Wilkins with something of mine in him and not the other way around.
Wilkins: He rode home sitting sideways in his buggy like a lady riding sidesaddle, and I'm told he hasn't sat square in a chair since haying season. And here's the best of it: he wrote in his report that the license was posted 'conspicuously and in good order.' Well, it was. He'd seen it closer than any man in New Hampshire.
♪ Banjo flourish, quick and wry
Wilkins: Now, I've talked enough about paper. Tonight I've got a guest who comes to us from a far southern hill country and a strange far season I can't rightly pronounce, a fellow from Wilkes County, North Carolina, who knows a revenue man by the sound of his breathing and the smell of his boots. Pull up a nail keg, Junior Vance.
Junior: Evenin', Doc. That bear of yours is a sight bigger than you let on. I came past that window and he looked at me like I was a ham with legs.
Wilkins: To Barnaby every man is a ham with legs, Junior. Some just have better legs. Now, I've been grousing about this license-on-the-wall business. Did your country have that rule too, this federal paper hanging in a dry county?
Junior: Doc, we had it and then some. The federal stamp. You paid Uncle Sam his money every July, and he'd give you a stamp says retail liquor dealer, and you were supposed to keep it up where a man could see it. And a heap of our counties were dry as a church sermon, so same as your Hosea, you were payin' Washington for the right to break the county's law.
Junior: My great-aunt Ludie ran a shot house out past the edge of Charlotte, just a little frame house with a porch swing and a sideboard. You'd come in, she'd pour you a shot in a jelly glass, you'd put your quarter in a cigar box. And right over that sideboard, Doc, she had her federal stamp in a gilt frame from the five-and-dime, hung right between her church pin for perfect attendance and a picture of her late husband, Vernon, in his Sunday collar.
Wilkins: Ha! So all three of them watched her pour.
Junior: All three, and Vernon looked the most disappointed. The federal man came by one time, read that stamp, tipped his hat, and said, 'Ma'am, you're square with the United States.' Ludie said, 'Well, I'm square with the Lord too, I got the pin.' He laughed so hard he had to sit on the porch swing, and she charged him a quarter for the sittin'.
Wilkins: Now that's a businesswoman. Did the county leave her be?
Junior: That's the catch, Doc. Those stamp lists were public. Anybody could walk into the collector's office and get the names of every man in the county who'd bought a stamp. We had a high sheriff, I won't name him, built like a rain barrel with a mustache, and one spring he got hold of that list and drove around with it spread out in his lap like a road map, knockin' on every door on it.
Junior: There was a fella ran a feed store up the road from us who never sold a drop in his life. He bought that stamp just to look respectable. He figured if he had the federal paper, folks would think he was a big operator and buy their chicken feed from him outta respect. Sheriff knocked, read the list, said 'You're on here,' and tore that feed store apart down to the floorboards. Never found a thing but forty sacks of laying mash and a cat. That man bought a twenty-dollar stamp and a three-hundred-dollar raid.
Wilkins: There's your federal paper for you. It's a confession you pay for yourself, Junior, and it came out the same in my valley. Now you must have had a brush with that 'one place only' rule. A license names the premises, after all.
Junior: Oh, Doc. I'm comin' down off the Brushies one night with the trunk full, and a federal man flags me at a crossroads with his flashlight, the lantern, you'd call it. I'd got a stamp off my cousin Ray. It was made out to his beer joint in Wilkesboro and it was tucked behind my sun visor. So I just hold it up real proud, like a man showin' his baptism papers.
Junior: That agent reads it, slow, movin' his lips, and he says, 'Son, this stamp is good for one place of business only. A car is not a place.' And I said, 'Mister, at ninety miles an hour she's three counties at once.' And then I proved it.
♦ A distant roar like a thunderclap rolling down a gully, fading fast
Wilkins: Ha! Three counties at once! I've never gone faster than my mare on a downhill with a hornet under her tail, but I take your meaning. Did he come after you?
Junior: He tried. By the time he got his door shut I was through Iredell and halfway to askin' Mecklenburg for directions. Ray was mad as a wet hen, though. Said I'd got his stamp all 'moved around.'
Wilkins: Now tell me, did your people argue the same as ours over what counted as retail? I had a whole general store come to blows over one jug.
Junior: Doc, that was the main entertainment of the whole winter. Two old men at the feed store in Wilkesboro, Mister Odell and Mister Tate, had a hundred and sixty years between 'em and maybe nine teeth. They argued from first frost to dogwood bloom over whether a case of jars sold to a church picnic was retail or wholesale. Odell said a case is a case and that's wholesale. Tate said every jar went to a different Baptist, so it was twelve retail sales. Odell said it was one deacon who bought it, and Tate said that deacon was drinkin' for twelve.
Wilkins: How did they settle it?
Junior: They split the case down the middle, six apiece, drank their half settin' on the feed sacks, and by suppertime they both agreed it was a fine Christian picnic. Neither one of 'em would ever tell who won. Died friends. Buried side by side, and I swear you can still hear 'em arguin' through the dirt.
Wilkins: Junior, you're a credit to every crooked road between here and the Carolinas. Stay by the stove, we'll want you after the sponsor.
Junior: I ain't movin', Doc. That bear's between me and the door.
♪ Fiddle and banjo bridge, rising to a brass-band flourish
♦ Wax crackle, a hand bell rung briskly
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♪ Brass flourish, cymbal crash, fades into crackle
♦ Wax crackle, fire popping in the stove, a slow drip into a jar
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft.
Wilkins: Now let me put on my alchemist's apron, the leather one with the burn holes, and talk about the work itself. Remember, all of this is history and education. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law, and if you're going to set up a still for anything, rose water or peppermint oil, you'd best know where the fire and the danger lie.
Wilkins: First, the mash. The old valley way for a corn-and-rye wash goes like this. Take a bushel of cracked corn and cook it in clean water until it goes soft and porridgy. Let it cool until you can hold your hand in it, no hotter than a warm bath, then stir in a peck of malted barley or rye malt. The malt carries the ferments that turn the starch to sugar, and it does that best when the mash is warm, not boiling. Let it rest. Cool it further to blood-warm and pitch your yeast. Then cover it loosely and leave it in a warm room for four to seven days, until the cap falls and the bubbling stops.
Wilkins: And mind that warm room. That fermenting mash breathes out a heavy, choking air that settles low like water in a cellar. Keep the room open to the air, and never climb down into a closed vat to fish out a dropped ladle. More than one man has gone down after a ladle and come up only for his own funeral.
Wilkins: Now the still. The copper is the honest workman here. As the vapor climbs through the helmet and runs along the arm, the copper grabs the sulfurous stinks and holds them on its own skin as a black crust, so the spirit comes over sweeter. That's why I clean my copper after every run with a wash of vinegar and salt, scrubbed bright, and then rinsed and rinsed again with clean water. You never let that green crust get into anything you mean to keep. And every joint is silver-soldered or properly fitted, with no lead anywhere in the works, because lead is a poison.
Wilkins: Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full, so it can't foam over into the arm. Then keep a low, patient fire. A roaring fire under a still is how a man wakes up with no eyebrows, no barn, and no future. Alcohol vapor catches fire easily, and if a joint leaks near an open flame the whole still-house can go up like a hay barn in August. Never walk away from a running still. Keep a bucket of water and a bucket of sand by the door, and never put your lantern near a leak.
♦ Liquid trickling slowly from a worm into a small jar
Wilkins: Now, the cuts. This is where an honest distiller is separated from a poisoner. The first liquor off the worm is the foreshots, sharp and stinking like a cobbler's glue pot. That's where much of the wood spirit comes. The chemists in France named it in 1834, the same stuff that blinds a man and stops his heart. It boils lower than good grain spirit, but here's what the know-it-alls on the tavern bench never understand: it doesn't come off in one neat slug. It smears through the whole front of the run. So you throw away the foreshots, a full gill or more for every five gallons of wash, and you pour it on the ground. Not in a bottle, not in a tooth rinse, not in your mother-in-law's tea, however tempting.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads, still harsh, smelling like varnish and a headache. Catch them in small jars and set them aside. Then come the hearts, clean and sweet and smooth, and the hearts are the reason a still exists. Then, as the run grows weak, the tails come, oily, wet-dog smelling, cloudy. Set them aside as well. Collecting in small jars, one after the other, and smelling each, is the only true method. Pride, guesswork, and a big jug are how wakes get started.
Wilkins: Revenue men are like toothaches: they come back every year, they always find the one spot you hoped they'd miss, and the only cure is cash or forceps. But a bad cut is worse than either, because there's no cure for it at all.
♪ Soft fiddle interlude
♦ Wax crackle, a click of a tape machine, a scratchy telephone-line hiss
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Call-In Line.
Wilkins: The talking-wire has delivered us a message from down south, from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, practically Junior's front yard. Let's hear it.
♦ Recorded voicemail, crackling, a rooster in the background
Wilkins: The caller is Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, and he asks this, and I quote him faithfully: 'Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?'
♦ Recording clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit, my boy, your uncle has had a long and loving acquaintance with swamp medicine, and I'll tell you why. Take the ash first. Every farm wife in New England knows hardwood ash. She leaches it in a hopper with rainwater and gets lye, and that lye is so strong she makes soap out of it and takes the hide off her own knuckles doing it. Pour that caustic into a thump keg and the best you'll get is a little sour stink knocked down and a muddy mess to clean out. The worst is a scald in the eye and a keg full of soap scum. It doesn't touch the wood spirit, because nothing does except the cuts at the worm.
Wilkins: Now the red oak. There's a grain of sense in it, the way there's one honest juror on a Concord jury. Oak shavings give tannin, color, and woody flavor, the same as a barrel does. Plenty of old-timers loaded their thump keg with apples, peaches, or a stick of oak to flavor what came through. That's seasoning, Rabbit, not cleaning. Ash in the thump keg is like perfume on a mule: it changes the smell for a minute and does nothing about the mule. If you want your heads gone, you catch them in small jars and you pour them out. Your uncle can keep his oak for flavor and his ashes for soap.
Junior: Doc, I've got to say it, that Rabbit's uncle sounds like half of Wilkes County. There was a fella on our road who put a whole buckeye in his thumper for luck.
Wilkins: And how was the luck?
Junior: Ran fine till the revenuers found it. Then it was just a buckeye.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That coin is for you, Rabbit. A big copper cent stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., to keep in your pocket and show your uncle the next time he reaches for the ash pail. My mother said I had a face for the back of a coin, and I've spent my life proving it by putting my name on the back of everybody else's.
Wilkins: Now, while I've got the anvil warm, let's knock down an old myth: the blue flame. Every tavern bench in the Republic has a man who pours a spoonful of spirit, sets a match to it, and pronounces judgment. 'Burns blue, it's good. Burns yellow or red, there's lead in it, and it'll kill you.'
♦ A match strikes, a soft whoomp of a small flame
Wilkins: Hogwash, all of it. The color of that flame depends on the strength of the spirit, the dirt on your spoon, the light in the room, and whatever the last fellow ate off it. And here's the part that turns my stomach: wood spirit, the very poison you most need to fear, burns with a pale blue flame you can barely see. So the spoon test will hand a man a jar of poison and swear it's fine. The blue-flame test tells you exactly one thing for certain, which is that you've set fire to a spoon.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, twice
Wilkins: There. Two more coppers for the myth's coffin. Proper cuts, clean copper, and no lead in the works are the only test worth trusting.
♪ Banjo and fiddle return, gentle and slow
♦ Wax crackle, a brass bell
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♦ Wax crackle, fire dying low, chain clinks
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF.
Wilkins: Junior Vance, thank you for coming all this way to sit by my stove and keep one eye on my bear.
Junior: Doc, it's been a pleasure. Tell that bear I don't taste near as good as I look.
Wilkins: He's heard that before, Junior, from better liars than you. And thank you, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, for the fine question. Keep your uncle away from the ash pail and your thump keg full of nothing but honest spirit.
Wilkins: And if tonight has put the itch in you to learn the craft properly, the copper, the cuts, the fire, and the law, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach it the way I pull a tooth: straight, quick, and with nothing left behind that'll fester. Learn to make your cuts honest, learn the law before the law learns you, and learn to keep your eyebrows where God put them.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme, fading into wax cylinder crackle