The grim Berliner and the gay Viennese both acknowledge the exhilarating influence of the wine. Champagne sparkles in crystal goblets in the great capital of the North, and the Moslem wipes its creamy foam from his beard beneath the very shadow of the mosque of St. Sophia; for the Prophet has only forbidden the use of wine, and of a surety--Allah be praised!--this strangely-sparkling delicious liquor, which gives to the true believer a foretaste of the joys of Paradise, cannot be wine. At the diamond-fields of South Africa and the diggings of Australia the brawny miner who has hit upon a big bit of crystallised carbon, or a nugget of virgin ore, strolls to the 'saloon' and shouts for Champagne. The mild Hindoo imbibes it quietly, but approvingly, as he watches the evolutions of the Nautch girls, and his partiality for the wine has already enriched the Anglo-Bengalee vocabulary and London slang with the word 'simkin.' It is transported on camel-backs across the deserts of Central Asia, and in frail canoes up the mighty Amazon. The two-sworded Daimio calls for it in the tea-gardens of Yokohama, and the New Yorker, when not rinsing his stomach by libations of iced water, imbibes it freely at Delmonico's. Wherever the Romans died they left traces behind them in their quaint funeral urns; wherever the civilised man of the nineteenth century has set his foot--at the base of the Pyramids and at the summit of the Cordilleras, in the mangrove swamps of Ashantee and the gulches of the Great Lone Land, in the wilds of the Amoor and on the desert isles of the Pacific--he has left traces of his presence in the shape of the empty bottles that were once full of the sparkling vintage of the Marne. They are strewn broadcast over the face of the globe, literally from Indus to the Pole. The crews of the Alert and the Discovery left them on the ice-bound verge of the paleocrystic sea; the French expeditionary columns have scattered them within the limits of the Great Sahara. In the lodges of the red man they are found playing the part of a great medicine, and in the huts of the negro they assume all the importance due to a big fetish. Stanley, arriving fainting and exhausted at the mouth of the Congo, hailed with joy the foil-tipped flask that the hospitable merchants who answered his appeal for succour had despatched; and as he quaffed its contents, recalled how he and Livingstone, when thousands of miles from any other European, had emptied a bottle of sparkling Champagne together on the night of their memorable meeting at Ujiji. And when, after the battle of Ulundi, the victorious British troops occupied Cetewayo's kraal, they found within the sable potentate's private chamber several empty Champagne bottles, the contents of which, it is to be presumed, he had quaffed the night before to the success of his followers. In the Transvaal too, during the negotiations for an armistice, Sir Evelyn Wood regaled the Boer delegates with Champagne.