Bhang,
another dreadful East Indian drink, and a deadly intoxicant, is distilled from hemp; and if it had only been round the neck of the inventor before he invented it, society would have benefited.
Saké,
the favourite beverage of the Japs, who got it from the Chinese, and improved upon it, is not a desirable swallow. It is a rapid intoxicant, but the over-estimator rapidly recovers the perpendicular. Saké was handed round as a liqueur, at the much-advertised banquet of the “Thirteen Club”; but it is said that the liqueur was in no subsequent request. Not even one of those {120} daring and adventurous mirror-smashers and salt-spillers express the desire to take-on saké “in a moog.”
Vodka
is the “livener” of the Russian peasantry, and is distilled from—what?
Plain Water,
whether fortunately or otherwise, comes under the heading of “Strange Swallows.” It is still consumed in prisons, and other places where sinners and paupers are dieted at the expense of the ratepayer. And hard as are the ways of the transgressor, his daily “quencher” is even harder. “Plain water,” wrote a celebrated Mongolian of his day, “has a malignant influence, and ought on no account to be drunk.” More especially if it be Thames water. I once saw a drop of this, very much magnified, displayed on a stretched cloth, in a side-show at the Crystal Palace. In that drop of water I counted three boa-constrictors, a few horrors which resembled giant lobsters, and a pair of turtles engaged, apparently, in a duel to the death. Three ladies in the front row of the stalls, at that exhibition, were carried out, swooning.
Whether cold water ought to be drunk, or not, I am bound, as a tolerably truthful chronicler, to remark that very few folk who can obtain any other sort of tipple do drink it.
It has been claimed by the Brahmins that {121}