ins
another slide, and then leaps back again. Much practice of this kind
serves very well as a familiar introduction to the use of glasses.

V. Passing The Bottle.

A brass button from the coat of Saint Peter, was at one time shown to
visitors among the treasures of a certain church in Nassau; possibly some
traveler of more experience may have met with a false collar from the
wardrobe of Saint Paul. The intellect displayed of old by holy saints and
martyrs, we may reasonably believe to have surpassed the measure of a
bishop's understanding in the present day; for we have the authority of
eyesight and tradition in asserting that the meanest of those ancient
worthies possessed not less than three skulls, and that a great saint must
have had so very many heads, that it would have built the fortune of a man
to be his hatter. Perhaps some of these relics are fictitious;
nevertheless, they are the boast of their possessors; they are exhibited
as genuine, and thoroughly believed to be so. Sir, did your stomach never
suggest to you that doctored elder-berry of a recent brew had been
uncorked with veneration at some dinner-table as a bottle of old port?
Have you experience of any festive friend, who can commit himself to doubt
about the age and genuineness of his wine? The cellar is the social
relic-chamber; every bin rejoices in a most veracious legend; and, whether
it be over wine or over relics that we wonder, equal difficulties start up
to obstruct our faith.

Our prejudices, for example, run so much in favor of one-headed men, that
we can scarcely entertain the notion of a saint who had six night-caps to
put on when he went to bed, and when he got up in the morning had six
beards to shave. Knowing that the Russians, by themselves, drink more
Champagne than France exports, and that it must rain grapes at Hockheim
before that place can yield all the wine we English label Hock, and
haunted as we are by the same difficulty when we look to other kinds of
foreign wine, we feel a justified suspicion that the same glass of
"genuine old port" can not be indulged in simultaneously by ten people. If
only one man of the number drinks it, what is that eidolon which delights
the other nine?

When George the Fourth was Regent, he possessed a small store of the
choicest wine, and never called for it. There were some gentlemen in his
establishment acquainted with its merits; these took upon themselves to
rescue it from undeserve