the whiskey barrel, and appropriated any cordage
wherewith you bound your chests and packages. I never had a chest, box,
or bale sent up by bateau or Durham boat that escaped this rope mail.

By the by, the Durham boat, a long decked barge, square ahead, and
square astern, has vanished; Ericson's screw-propellers have crushed it.
It was neither invented by nor named after Lord Durham, but was as
ancient as Lambton House itself.

The way the conductors of these boats found out vinous liquors was, as
brother Jonathan so playfully observes, a _caution_.

I have known an instance of a cask of wine, which, for security from
climate, had an outer case or cask strongly secured over it, with an
interior space for neutralizing frost or heat, bored so carefully that
you could never discover how it had been effected, and a very
considerable quantum of beverage extracted.

I once had a small barrel, perhaps twenty gallons of commissariat West
India ration rum, the best of all rum for liqueurs, sucked dry. Of
course, it had leaked, but I never could discover the leak, and it held
any liquid very well afterwards.

I know the reader likes a story, and as this is not by any means an
historical or scientific work, excepting always the geological portion
thereof, I will tell him or her, as the case may be, a story about
ration rum.

There was a funny fellow, an Irish auctioneer at Kingston, some years
ago, called Paddy Moran, whom all the world, priest and parson, minister
and methodist, soldier and sailor, tinker and tailor, went to hear when
he mounted his rostrum.

He was selling the goods of a quarter-master-general who was leaving the
place. At last he came to the cellar and the rum. "Now, gintlemin," says
Moran, "I advise you to buy this rum, 7s. 6d. a gallon! going, going!
Gintlemin, I was once a sojer--don't laugh, you officers there, for I
was--and a sirjeant into the bargain. It wasn't in the Irish
militia--bad luck to you, liftenant, for laughing that way, it will
spoil the rum! I was the tip-top of the sirjeants of the regiment--long
life to it! Yes, I was quarter-master-sirjeant, and hadn't I the sarving
out of the rations; and didn't I know what good ration rum was; and
didn't I help meself to the prime of it! Well, then, gintlemin and
ladies--I mane, Lord save yees, ladies and gintlemin--if a
quarter-master-sirjeant in the army had good rum, what the devil do you
think a quarter-master-general gets?"

The rum ros