As you wandered among the hills you could set your fusee alight on a stone in a torrent bed over which in ordinary summers rolls a volume of foaming waters. The demand for beer wherever you went was in these circumstances something wonderful; and at times, on the arrival of coach or steamer with its load of panting tourists, the bawling from husky throats for a supply--an instant and copious supply--of the delicious liquid was sufficiently amusing. One of the happiest illustrations of the proverbial close treading of the ridiculous on the heels of the sublime, and the wafer-like thinness of the partition that divides the sentimental from the absurd, was Dr. Johnson's celebrated parody on the quasi-sentimental style of poetry so much in vogue in his latter years--and sooth to say too much in vogue in our day as well--a style as unlike the school of Pope as you can well imagine, and the very antipodes of the sturdily masculine and didactic strains which Johnson, an intellectual giant--for there were giants in these days--alone accounted true poetry:-- "Hermit hoar, in solemn cell, Wearing out life's evening grey, Smite thy bosom, sage, and tell What is bliss? and which the way? "Thus I spoke; and speaking sighed; Scarce repressed the starting tear; When the smiling sage replied,-- 'Come, my lad, and drink some beer!'" And very well hit off, you will confess; an arrow shot from an Ulysses' bow at the puling whimperers of a namby-pamby sentimentalism that they miscalled poetry; but if we dared for the nonce to take these lines in a more serious and literal sense than their author intended, we should say that in such hot and parching weather as we have recently had, and are still having, there is more "bliss" in a good draught of "Allsopp" or "Bass" than is dreamt of in the philosophy of the sentimentalists, and thousands upon thousands of this season's tourists are ready, we'll be bound, to homologate this statement.