Longer faces and sourer tempers will be the result, and many a young aspirant to church membership will be found deficient in necessary Christian graces, which the charitable eyes of his thirsty examiners might have found in abundance, had not the Maine Law interfered with the generosity of their judgment, and made their vision less clear than usual.
But these are things it will not do to speak of; only the gross appetites of the three cent drinker should be made matters of common conversation.
Travelling lately through the thirsty State of Ohio, I had many opportunities of observing how they get round and over the letter of the Law.
In that state the framers of the law, with a commendable regard for the commercial welfare of their constituents, many of whom are large vine-growers, inserted a special clause allowing the traffic in beer and native wine to remain unmolested.
Travellers will therefore find in this State now a greater variety of wine than is grown in any other one country in the world.
Liquors which he, in another place, would recognise as brandy, rum, or gin, are partially disguised under transparent cognomens as native wine.
Brandy-"smashes," rum-punches, gin-cock-tails, sherry-cobblers, mint-juleps, and every kind of desirable potable, are all manufactured from "Longworth's Sparkling"—old corn-whiskey is known as "Still Catawba"—and a vast deal of the "lager-beer" is put up in brandy casks, and tastes exceedingly like the genuine article.
Being in the vicinity of the Pork city (where they have a ham on the top of the tallest church spire in the place, pointing with the knuckle end to Heaven,) I had an opportunity to visit a large wine-cellar which belonged to Damphool's uncle, who was to accompany us, and had also from him permission to taste the different vintages.
Got to the place, went down cellar, boy gave each of us a long stick with a tallow candle on the end; got down; wine everywhere, in big casks, in long bottles, in small bottles, in tin dippers, in glass vials, and in little puddles on the floor.
Bottles ranged in regiments all wrong side up with cobwebs on the corks.