"A British officer lay on his camp-bed in India suffering from cholera. His medical attendants had concluded that nothing more could be done for him, and that his seizure must end fatally. His friends visited him to shake his hand and to offer their sympathetic good-byes, including his dearest regimental chum, who, deciding to keep his emotion down by assuming a cheerful demeanour, remarked, 'Well, old chap, we all must go sometime and somehow. Is there anything you would like me to get you?' Hardly able to speak, the sufferer indicated, 'I'll take a drop of champagne with you, as a last friendly act, if I can get it down.' With difficulty he took a little, and still lives to tell the story." Since the "affecting instance of Colonel Snobley" we have had nothing quite so rich as that--unless, indeed, it was the thrill of loyal rejoicing which ran round the nation when, just before Christmas 1871, it was announced that our present Sovereign, then in the throes of typhoid, had called for a glass of beer. Then, like true Britons, reared on malt and hops, we felt that all was well, and addressed ourselves to our Christmas turkey with the comfortable assurance that the Prince of Wales had turned the corner. Reared on malt and hops, I said; but many other ingredients went to the system on which some of us were reared. "That poor creature, small beer" at meal-time, was reinforced by a glass of port wine at eleven, by brandy and water if ever one looked squeamish, by mulled claret at bedtime in cold weather, by champagne on all occasions of domestic festivity, and by hot elderberry wine if one had a cold in the head. Poison? quotha. It was like Fontenelle's coffee, and, even though some of us have not yet turned eighty, at any rate we were not cut off untimely nor hurried into a drunkard's grave. And then think of the men whom the system produced! Thackeray (who knew what he was talking about) said that "our intellect ripens with good cheer and throws off surprising crops under the influence of that admirable liquid, claret." But all claret, according to Dr. Johnson, would be port if it could; and a catena of port wine-drinkers could contain some of the most famous names of the last century. Mr. Gladstone, to whom the other pleasures of the table meant nothing, was a stickler for port, a believer in it, a judge of it. The only feeble speech which, in my hearing, he ever made was made after dining at an otherwise hospitable house where wine was not suffered to appear. Lord Tennyson, until vanquished by Sir Andrew Clark, drank his bottle of port every day, and drank it undecanted, for, as he justly observed, a decanter holds only eight glasses, but a black bottle nine. Mr. Browning, if he could have his own way, drank port all through dinner as well as after it. Sir Moses Montefiore, who, as his kinsfolk said, got up to par--or, in other words, completed his hundred years,--had drunk a bottle of port every day since he came to man's estate. Dr.