t, to
brewers, or distillers, or wine and brandy merchants.

This gentleman, in a sweet alphabetical miscellany of drugs, herbs,
minerals, and groceries commonly used in manufacturing our best Old
Bourbon whisky, Swan gin, Madeira wine, pale ale, London brown stout,
Heidsieck, Clicquot, Lafitte, and other nice drinks; names the chief of
such ingredients as follows:

Aloes, alum, calamus (flag-root) capsicum, cocculus indicus, copperas,
coriander-seed, gentian-root, ginger, grains-of-paradise, honey,
liquorice, logwood, molasses, onions, opium, orange-peel, quassia, salt,
stramonium-seed (deadly nightshade), sugar of lead, sulphite of soda,
sulphuric acid, tobacco, turpentine, vitriol, yarrow. I have left
strychnine out of the list, as some persons have doubts about this
poison ever being used in adulterating liquors. A wholesale
liquor-dealer in New York city, however, assures me that more than
one-half the so-called whisky is poisoned with it.

Besides these twenty-seven kinds of rum, here come twenty-three more
articles, used to put the right color to it when it is made; by making a
soup of one or another, and stirring it in at the right time. I alphabet
these, too: alkanet-root, annatto, barwood, blackberry, blue-vitriol,
brazil-wood, burnt sugar, cochineal, elderberry, garancine (an extract
of madder), indigo, Nicaragua-wood, orchil, pokeberry, potash,
quercitron, red beet, red cabbage, red carrots, saffron, sanders-wood,
turmeric, whortleberry.

In all, in both lists, just fifty. There are more, however. But that's
enough. Now then, my friend, what did you drink this morning? You called
it Bourbon, or Cognac, or Old Otard, very likely, but what was it? The
"glorious uncertainty" of drinking liquor under these circumstances is
enough to make a man's head swim without his getting drunk at all. There
might, perhaps, be found a consolation like that of the Western
traveller about the hash. "When I travel in a canal-boat or steam-boat,"
quoth this brave and stout-stomached man, "I always eat the hash,
because then I know what I've got!"

It was a good many years ago that the Parliament of England found it
necessary to make a law to prevent sophisticating malt liquors. Here is
the list of things they forbid to put into beer: "molasses, honey,
liquorice, vitriol, quassia, cocculus indicus, grains-of-paradise,
Guinea-pepper, opium." The penalty was one thousand dollars fine on the
brewer, and two thousand five hundre