permission to send for some of a very superior quality from his own cellar. The wine is brought accordingly, a bottle drawn by Monsieur himself with great solemnity and some grimace, relating at the same time its whole history. Clean glasses are called for, Monsieur fills a bumper, and after contemplating it for a moment against the light, hands it to me with a profound inclination. In colour it exactly resembles what is on the table. I taste it: there is not a shade of difference in the flavour. M. le Juge fills a glass for each of my companions, and hands it to them with the same ceremonious bow. It was easy to see that their opinions coincided with mine; but we did not wish to hurt the good man, and so we one and all smacked our lips, and pronounced it excellent. He immediately ordered a further supply, and insisted on our drinking nothing else. However, the bottles becoming mingled on the table, none of us could distinguish the difference, and our friend himself, I observed, filled his own glass indiscriminately from the one and the other. He meant to treat us, and took this way of accomplishing it, no doubt. We found him an intelligent, facetious companion, although, as we got farther into the night, he did get a little prosy with his anecdotes of the good people of Dendermonde. _En revanche_, he amused us much with a description of the process of enrolling the militia then going on; and droll pictures he drew of the peasantry who were brought to him for that purpose every day by the _gens-d’armés_. It would seem that these people were forced into the service sorely against their will, being much attached to Buonaparte, and quite averse to the new order of things. This seemed to be the general feeling amongst the bourgeois of Dendermonde, as far as we could learn; and it appeared very doubtful whether our worthy host himself, although a public functionary under the new Government, did not participate in this rage for Napoleon and Impérialisme. Be that, however, as it may, he was so well pleased with our society, that the first cocks crew ere he retired, his hiccoughing adieus and twinkling eye fully demonstrating that, for him at least, the wine was not quite such watery stuff as we had at first imagined. To us _port-drinkers_ it was innocuous. The next day we had leisure to look about us, and visit Dendermonde--a place, in my mind, inseparably connected with Corporal Trim and Uncle Toby; and no little amusement was it to my good Juge and his spouse when I related to them the story. They thought it all true for a time.