d soar in a thousand savage
forms, and their dull thunder fills your ears with a confusion of sound.
Your eyes become accustomed to the dimness, and you discern more
clearly the features of those swarthy men, bearded and gnome-like. But
the molten mass has been put into the mould; you watch it withdrawn, the
bottom indented, the mouth cut and shaped. And now it is complete, but
still red-hot, and glowing with an infernal transparency, gem-like and
wonderful; it is a bottle fit now for the juice of satanic vineyards,
and the miraculous potions of eternal youth, for which men in the old
days bartered their immortal souls.

And the effect of a _bodega_ is picturesque, too, though in a different
way. It is a bright and cheerful spot, a huge shed with whitewashed
walls and an open roof supported by dark beams; great casks are piled
up, impressing you in their vast rotundity with a sort of aldermanic
stateliness. The whole place is fragrant with clean, vinous perfumes.
Your guide carries a glass and a long filler. You taste wine after wine,
in different shades of brown; light wines to drink with your dinner,
older wines to drink before your coffee; wines more than a century old,
of which the odour is more delicate than violets; new wines of the
preceding year, strong and rough; Amontillados, with the softest flavour
in the world; Manzanillas for the gouty; Marsalas, heavy and sweet;
wines that smell of wild-flowers; cheap wines and expensive wines. Then
the brandies--the distiller tells you proudly that Spanish brandy is
made from wine, and contemptuously that French brandy is not--old
brandies for which a toper would sell his soul; new brandies like
fusel-oil; brandies mellow and mild and rich. It is a drunkard's
paradise.

And why should not the drinker have his paradise? The teetotallers have
slapped their bosoms and vowed that liquor was the devil's own
invention. (Note, by the way, that liquor is a noble word that should
not be applied to those weak-kneed abominations that insolently flaunt
their lack of alcohol. Let them be called liquids or fluids or
beverages, or what you will. Liquor is a word for heroes, for the
British tar who has built up British glory--Imperialism is quite the
fashion now.) And for a hundred years none has dared lift his voice in
refutation of these dyspeptic slanders. The toper did not care, he
nursed his bottle and let the world say what it would; but the moderate
drinker was abashed. Who wil