In the great cellars in which the juice is stored, the listener at the door—he cannot brave the carbonic acid gas to enter further—may hear, solemnly echoing in the cool shade of the great darkened hall, the bubblings and seethings of the working liquid—the inarticulate accents and indistinct rumblings which proclaim that a great metempsychosis is taking place—that a natural substance is rising higher in the eternal scale of things, and that the contents of these great giants of vats are becoming changed from floods of mere mawkish, sweetish fluid to noble wine—to a liquid honored and esteemed in all ages—to a medicine exercising a strange and potent effect upon body and soul—great for good and evil. Is there not something fanciful and poetic in the notion of this change taking place mysteriously in the darkness, when all the doors are locked and barred—for the atmosphere about the vats is death—as if Nature would suffer no idle prying into her mystic operations, and as if the grand transmutation and projection from juice to wine had in it something of a secret and solemn and awful nature—fenced round, as it were, and protected from vulgar curiosity by the invisible halo of stifling gas? I saw the vats in the Château Margaux cellars the day after the grape-juice had been flung in. Fermentation had not as yet properly commenced, so access to the place was possible; still, however, there was a strong vinous smell loading the atmosphere, sharp and subtle in its influence on the nostrils; while, putting my ear, on the recommendation of my conductor, to the vats, I heard, deep down, perhaps eight feet down in the juice, a seething, gushing sound, as if currents and eddies were beginning to flow, in obedience to the influence of the working Spirit, and now and then a hiss and a low bubbling throb, as though of a pot about to boil. Within twenty-four hours, the cellar would be unapproachable.