Champagne of Rheims and Epernay! Bah!
Avaunt, Veuve Clicquot, thou elderly Hebe! Avaunt, with thy besugared, begassed, bedevilled, becorked, bewired, poptious manufacture! Some day, at a dull dinner-party, I will think of thee and poison myself with thy poison, that I may become deaf to the voice of the vulgar woman to whom some fatal hostess may consign me. But now let no thought of Champagne, even of that which the Veuve may keep for her moment most lacrymose of “veuvage,” interfere with my remembrance of the Luggernel Spring.
Champagne to that! More justly a Satyr to Hyperion; a stage-moon to Luna herself; an Old-World peach to a peach of New Jersey; a Democratic Platform to the Declaration of Independence; a pinching, varnished boot to a winged sandal of Mercury; Faustina to Charlotte Corday; a senatorial speech to a speech of Wendell Phillips; anything crude, base, and sham to anything fine, fresh, and true.
Ah, poor Kissingen! Alas, unfragrant Sharon! Alack, stale Saratoga! Ichabod! Adieu to you all when the world knows the virtues of Luggernel!
But never when the O-fartunatus-nimium world has come into this new portion of its heritage,—never when Luggernel is renowned and fashion blooms about its brim,—never when gentlemen of the creamiest cream in the next half-century offer to ladies as creamy beakers bubbling full of that hypernectareous tipple,—never will any finer body or fairer soul of a woman be seen there about than her whom I served that morning. And, indeed, among the heroic gentlemen of the riper time to come, I cannot dream that any will surpass in all the virtues and courtesies of the cavalier my friend John Brent, now dismounted and lying there wounded and patient.
Oranges before breakfast are good. There be who on awakening gasp for the cocktail. And others, who, fuddled last night, are limp in their lazy beds, till soda-water lends them its fizzle. Eye-openers these of moderate calibre. But, with all the vigorous vitality I have claimed, perhaps I might still have remembered yesterday with its Gallop of Three, its suspense, its eager dash and its certainty, and remembered them with new anxieties for to-day, except for my morning draught of exhilaration from the unbottled, unmixed sources of Luggernel. Thanks La Grenouille, rover of the wilderness, for thy froggish instinct and this blissful discovery!
I stooped and lapped. Long ago Gideon Barakson recognized the thorough-going braves because they took their water by the throatful, not by the palmful. And when I had lapped enough, and let the great bubbles of laughing gas burst in my face, I took a beaker,—to be sure it was battered tin, and had hung at the belt of a dastard,—a beaker of that “cordial julep” to my friend. He was awake and looking about him, seeking for some one.
“Come to your gruel, old fellow!” said I.
He drank the airy water and sat up revived.
“It is like swallowing the first sunbeam on the crown of a snow-peak,” he said.